How to get the PID of a process by giving the process name in Mac OS X ?

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I am writing a script to monitor the CPU and MEM of any given process. For that i need to send in the name of the process to be monitored as a commandline argument. For example. 

./monitorscript <pname>

I need to get the pid of the process in the script so that i can use a ps -p <pid> inside.

How do i get the pid of a process given its process name?

I understand that there might be multiple processes in the same name. I just want to get the first process out of that list.

pid macos shell process bash
9 Answers

ps -o ppid=$(ps -ax | grep nameOfProcess | awk '{print $1}')

Prints out the changing process pid and then the parent PID. You can then kill the parent, or you can use that parentPID in the following command to get the name of the parent process:

ps -p parentPID -o comm=

For me the parent was 'login' :\

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