Lets say I am running
$: ps au
in a shell prompt and want to select 2nd field of 5th entry in that, no matter which process it is. How do I do that ?
With awk.
awk 'NR==6 { print $2 }'
The 6th record because you need to skip the header.
If you don't want to use awk or the equivalent perl or ruby commands, you can also use more low-level tools:
ps au | head -6 | tail -1 | cut -d ' ' -f 2
In "ps au" output, second field is the process ID; you can extract it directly by telling to ps what you need:
ps a -o pid=
Then you just need to output the fifth line:
ps a -o pid= | sed '5!d'
Related
I need to grep both header and also particular pattern only using grep,
eg
for command "ps"
output
PID TTY TIME CMD
10280 pts/16 00:00:00 ps
32463 pts/16 00:00:00 bash
how can i grep both header and pattern like 32463 so output should be
PID TTY TIME CMD
32463 pts/16 00:00:00 bash
And One thing is that solution should be general that means it should be applicable to all commands that have headers
Try this:
ps | head -1; ps | grep bash
Like this:
ps | ( read -r head; printf '%s\n' "$head"; grep bash )
This generalizes to other commands, such as
( read -r head; printf '%s\n' "$head"; sort -k4n ) <input.csv >input-sorted-4n.csv
You could encapsulate this into a script called keepheader:
#!/bin/sh
read -r head
printf '%s\n' "$head"
exec "$#"
Use like
ps | keepheader grep bash
keepheader sort -k4n <input.csv >input-sorted-4n.csv
or maybe even
keepheader keepheader grep foo <<HERE
Header with underlines
------ ---- ----------
Cat food Whiskas
Mouse bait Cheese
HERE
(Actually maybe make the script accept an optiinal numeric parameter to specify how many header lines to keep; I leave this as an exercise for the reader.)
I suggest sed:
sed -n "1p;/$pattern/p"
how can i grep both header and pattern
You could try this
ps | grep -e 'PID\|32463'
solution should be general that means it should be applicable to all commands that have headers
This requirement is almost impossible to satisfy by grep, because different commands have different headers, it is impossible to assign a regular expression to match all of them.
But you could use the following command to achieve your goal:
command | perl -e 'while(<STDIN>) { print if $. == 1 or m/$ARGV[0]/ }' pattern
If it is too cumbersome for daily use, you can put it in a custom script, such as my-grep, and put that script in your $PATH, then you can use that script like a normal command:
command | my-grep pattern
With out using grep you can get this output for ps option
$ps -p 32463
-p Select by PID.
This selects the processes whose process ID numbers appear in pidlist. Identical to p and --pid.
I need create a shell script to list the process by status type.
The output must be something like:
Process running:
[process]
Process sleeping:
[process]
ETC
I did this, but doesnt work the ps aux | awk '$8 ~ PROCESS':
for PROCESS in `ps -v | awk 'NR!=1 {print $2}' | sort -u`; do
echo "Procesos como $PROCESS:"
ps aux | awk '$8 ~ PROCESS'
done
Cause that script outputs all the process, not filter by Process.
Any help?
A simple solution would be to use ps and sort:
ps u | sort -rk 8
-r reverses the sort (so that the list header remains above), and -k 8 selects the 8th field (STAT).
You can then select processes in a specific state using anything form head to awk, and print out whatever you like.
You can also use top, in non-interactive mode ( the -S option to display and sort by state):
top -b -n 1 -S
I'm trying to get the PID field of ps -aux. I know I can achieve this using ps -aux | awk '{print $2}', but as practice wanted to see if I can do the same using the cut command. My idea is to specify a delimiter and chose the second field like this:
ps -aux | cut -d[delimiter] -f2
Using space as a delimiter (' ') did not work, neither did tab (\t).
In general, how do I find out the exact character of a white-space in linux?
To identify otherwise unprintable or similar-looking characters (like whitespace), pipe output to a tool like xxd or od -c. For example, this outputs both the hex values of each character as well as the text for easy lookup:
ps -aux | xxd -g 1 # -g 1 outputs each character individually
However I think your issue is that ps -aux uses multiple spaces between the fields; cut does not handle multiple consecutive delimiters, so it prints whatever's between the first and second space, i.e. nothing.
If you really want to use cut you have to remove both leading spaces and duplicate spaces:
ps -aux | sed 's/^ *//;s/ */ /g' | cut -d' ' -f2
cut doesn't support multi-chars as delimit.
There are multiple whitespace between fields, if you really want to use cut:
ps aux | sed 's/ */ /g' | cut -d ' ' -f 2
To get the PID of a ps command you can do this:
ps -aux | cut -c10-15
For information: the u that you use in ps aux means, according to man ps:
u Display user-oriented format
So you're explicitly asking for a human readable output and then you parse it with some tool? That's not very appropriate (to say the least). If you need to format the output of ps, please use the -o (or --format) option, if your version of ps accepts it. Hence:
ps ax -o pid
will be much better.
an Unix shell script with only purpose - count the number of running processes of qmail (could be anything else). Easy thing, but there must be some bug in code:
#!/bin/bash
rows=`ps aux | grep qmail | wc -l`
echo $rows
Because
echo $rows
always shows greater number of rows (11) than if I just count rows in
ps aux | grep qmail
There are just 8 rows. Does it work this way on your system too?
Nowadays with linux, there is pgrep. If you have it on your system, you can skip grep -v grep
$ var=$(pgrep bash) # or `pgrep bash | wc -l`
$ echo $var
2110 2127 2144 2161 2178 2195 2212 2229
$ set -- $var; echo ${#}
8
also, if your ps command has -C option, another way
$ ps -C bash -o pid= | wc -l
if not, you can set a character class in your grep pattern
$ ps aux|grep [q]mail | wc -l
It appears that you're counting the grep process itself and the header line that ps normally prints before its output.
I'd suggest something more like:
qprocs=$(ps auxwww | grep -c "[q]mail")
... note that GNU grep has a "-c" switch to have it print a "count" of matches rather than the lines themselves. The trick with the regular expression here is to match qmail without matching the literal string that's on the grep command line. So we take any single character in the string and wrap it in square brackets such that it is a single character "class." The regexp: [q]mail matches the string qmail without matching the string [q]mail.
Note that even with this regex you may still find some false positive matches. If you really want to be more precise then you should supply a custom output format string to your ps command (see the man pages) or you should feed it through a pipemill or you should parse the output of the ps command based on fields (using awk or cut or a while read loop). (The -o option to ps is by far the easiest among these).
No, since I'm not running qmail. However, you will want to, at a bare minimum, exclude the process running your grep:
ps aux | grep qmail | grep -v grep
For debugging, you may want to do:
rows=`ps aux | grep qmail`
echo $rows >debug.input
od -xcb debug.input
(to see your input to the script in great detail) and then rewrite your script temporarily as:
#!/bin/bash
rows=`cat debug.input | wc -l`
echo $rows
That way, you can see the input and figure out what effect it's having on your code, even as you debug it.
A good debugger will eventually learn to only change one variable at a time. If your changing your code to get it working, that's the variable - don't let the input to your code change as well.
Use
$ /sbin/pidof qmail
A few ways...
ps -e | grep ' [q]mail' | wc -l
ps -C qmail -opid= | wc -l
pidof qmail | tr ' ' '\n' | wc -l
pgrep is on many Linux distributions, and I imagine available for other Unices.
[dan#khorium ~]$ whatis pgrep
pgrep (1) - look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes
[dan#khorium ~]$ pgrep mingetty
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
In your case, pgrep qmail | wc -l should do the trick.
I want to do this:
run a command
capture the output
select a line
select a column of that line
Just as an example, let's say I want to get the command name from a $PID (please note this is just an example, I'm not suggesting this is the easiest way to get a command name from a process id - my real problem is with another command whose output format I can't control).
If I run ps I get:
PID TTY TIME CMD
11383 pts/1 00:00:00 bash
11771 pts/1 00:00:00 ps
Now I do ps | egrep 11383 and get
11383 pts/1 00:00:00 bash
Next step: ps | egrep 11383 | cut -d" " -f 4. Output is:
<absolutely nothing/>
The problem is that cut cuts the output by single spaces, and as ps adds some spaces between the 2nd and 3rd columns to keep some resemblance of a table, cut picks an empty string. Of course, I could use cut to select the 7th and not the 4th field, but how can I know, specially when the output is variable and unknown on beforehand.
One easy way is to add a pass of tr to squeeze any repeated field separators out:
$ ps | egrep 11383 | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 4
I think the simplest way is to use awk. Example:
$ echo "11383 pts/1 00:00:00 bash" | awk '{ print $4; }'
bash
Please note that the tr -s ' ' option will not remove any single leading spaces. If your column is right-aligned (as with ps pid)...
$ ps h -o pid,user -C ssh,sshd | tr -s " "
1543 root
19645 root
19731 root
Then cutting will result in a blank line for some of those fields if it is the first column:
$ <previous command> | cut -d ' ' -f1
19645
19731
Unless you precede it with a space, obviously
$ <command> | sed -e "s/.*/ &/" | tr -s " "
Now, for this particular case of pid numbers (not names), there is a function called pgrep:
$ pgrep ssh
Shell functions
However, in general it is actually still possible to use shell functions in a concise manner, because there is a neat thing about the read command:
$ <command> | while read a b; do echo $a; done
The first parameter to read, a, selects the first column, and if there is more, everything else will be put in b. As a result, you never need more variables than the number of your column +1.
So,
while read a b c d; do echo $c; done
will then output the 3rd column. As indicated in my comment...
A piped read will be executed in an environment that does not pass variables to the calling script.
out=$(ps whatever | { read a b c d; echo $c; })
arr=($(ps whatever | { read a b c d; echo $c $b; }))
echo ${arr[1]} # will output 'b'`
The Array Solution
So we then end up with the answer by #frayser which is to use the shell variable IFS which defaults to a space, to split the string into an array. It only works in Bash though. Dash and Ash do not support it. I have had a really hard time splitting a string into components in a Busybox thing. It is easy enough to get a single component (e.g. using awk) and then to repeat that for every parameter you need. But then you end up repeatedly calling awk on the same line, or repeatedly using a read block with echo on the same line. Which is not efficient or pretty. So you end up splitting using ${name%% *} and so on. Makes you yearn for some Python skills because in fact shell scripting is not a lot of fun anymore if half or more of the features you are accustomed to, are gone. But you can assume that even python would not be installed on such a system, and it wasn't ;-).
try
ps |&
while read -p first second third fourth etc ; do
if [[ $first == '11383' ]]
then
echo got: $fourth
fi
done
Your command
ps | egrep 11383 | cut -d" " -f 4
misses a tr -s to squeeze spaces, as unwind explains in his answer.
However, you maybe want to use awk, since it handles all of these actions in a single command:
ps | awk '/11383/ {print $4}'
This prints the 4th column in those lines containing 11383. If you want this to match 11383 if it appears in the beginning of the line, then you can say ps | awk '/^11383/ {print $4}'.
Using array variables
set $(ps | egrep "^11383 "); echo $4
or
A=( $(ps | egrep "^11383 ") ) ; echo ${A[3]}
Similar to brianegge's awk solution, here is the Perl equivalent:
ps | egrep 11383 | perl -lane 'print $F[3]'
-a enables autosplit mode, which populates the #F array with the column data.
Use -F, if your data is comma-delimited, rather than space-delimited.
Field 3 is printed since Perl starts counting from 0 rather than 1
Getting the correct line (example for line no. 6) is done with head and tail and the correct word (word no. 4) can be captured with awk:
command|head -n 6|tail -n 1|awk '{print $4}'
Instead of doing all these greps and stuff, I'd advise you to use ps capabilities of changing output format.
ps -o cmd= -p 12345
You get the cmmand line of a process with the pid specified and nothing else.
This is POSIX-conformant and may be thus considered portable.
Bash's set will parse all output into position parameters.
For instance, with set $(free -h) command, echo $7 will show "Mem:"