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

Question

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  lt pname gt    I need to get the pid of the process in the script so that i can use a ps -p  lt pid gt  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

User · Answer

This solution matches the process name more strictly:

ps -Ac -o pid,comm | awk '/^ *[0-9]+ Dropbox$/ {print $1}'

This solution has the following advantages:

it ignores command line arguments like tail -f ~/Dropbox
it ignores processes inside a directory like ~/Dropbox/foo.sh
it ignores processes with names like ~/DropboxUID.sh

User · Answer

You can use the pgrep command like in the following example    pgrep Keychain  Access 44186

User · Answer

This is the shortest command I could find that does the job   ps -ax   awk    t he app name  print  1     Putting brackets around the first letter stops awk from finding the awk process itself

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Why don t you run TOP and use the options to sort by other metrics  other than PID  Like  highest used PID from the CPU MEM   top -o cpu  lt ---sorts all processes by CPU Usage

User · Answer

You can install pidof with Homebrew   brew install pidof pidof  lt process name gt

User · Answer

Try this one   echo    ps -ceo pid  comm    awk   firefox    print  1  exit        The ps command produces output like this  with the PID in the first column and the executable name  only  in the second column   bookworm  ps -ceo pid  comm      1 launchd    10 kextd    11 UserEventAgent    12 mDNSResponder    13 opendirectoryd    14 notifyd    15 configd      which awk processes  printing the first column  pid  and exiting after the first match

User · Answer

The answer above was mostly correct  just needed some tweaking for the different parameters in Mac OSX   ps -A   grep  f irefox   awk   print  1

User · Answer

You can try this  pid   ps -o pid  comm    grep -m1  procname   cut -d    -f1

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

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