Linux / Bash, using ps -o to get process by specific name?

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I am trying to use the ps -o command to get just specific info about processes matching a certain name. However, I am having some issues on this, when I try to use this even to just get all processes, like so, it just returns a subset of what a normal ps -ef would return (it doesn't return nearly the same number of results so its not returning all running processes)

ps -ef -o pid,time,comm

I want to try something like this (below) but incorporate the ps -o to just get specific info from it (just the PID)

ps -ef |grep `whoami`| grep firefox-bin

Any advice is appreciated as to how to do this properly, thanks

5 Answers

Sorry, much late to the party, but I'll add here that if you wanted to capture processes with names identical to your search string, you could do

pgrep -x PROCESS_NAME

-x          Require an exact match of the process name, or argument list if -f is given.
             The default is to match any substring.

This is extremely useful if your original process created child processes (possibly zombie when you query) which prefix the original process' name in their own name and you are trying to exclude them from your results. There are many UNIX daemons which do this. My go-to example is ninja-dev-sync.

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