How to grep ps output with headers

Question

How can I grep the PS output with the headers in place?

These two process make up an app running on my server....

root     17123 16727  0 16:25 pts/6    00:00:00 grep GMC
root     32017     1 83 May03 ?        6-22:01:17 /scripts/GMC/PNetT-5.1-SP1/PNetTNetServer.bin -tempdir /usr/local/GMC/PNetT-5.1-SP1/tmpData -D

does 6-22:01:17 mean that it's been running for 6 days? I'm tring to determine the length of how long the process has been running...

Is the 2nd column the process id? So if I do kill 32017 it'll kill the 2nd process?

Answer 1

ps -ef | egrep "GMC|PID"

Replace the "GMC" and ps switches as needed.

Example output:

root@xxxxx:~$ ps -ef | egrep "disk|PID"

UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
paremh1  12501 12466  0 18:31 pts/1    00:00:00 egrep disk|PID
root     14936     1  0 Apr26 ?        00:02:11 /usr/lib/udisks/udisks-daemon
root     14937 14936  0 Apr26 ?        00:00:03 udisks-daemon: not polling any devices

ps -e selects all processes, and ps -f is full-format listing which shows the column headers.

Answer 2

Thanks to geekosaur, I would like to use this command for your demands, rather than a separated command:

ps -ef | head -1; ps -ef | grep "your-pattern-goes-here"

The tricky is to make use of the ";" supported by the shell to chain the command.

Answer 3

easier alternative: ps -ef | { head -1; grep GMC; }

replace the number with the number of lines your header is displayed on.

Answer 4

Second column is the process id; 4th is when the process was created (this is usually the time your program started, but not always; consider execve() and friends); 6th is the amount of CPU time consumed. So it's been running for 8 days and used almost 7 days of CPU time, which I would consider worrisome.

Getting the header in the same invocation is tricky at best; I'd just do a separate ps | head -1. You might consider using ps's own selection methods or something like pgrep instead of grep, which isn't really designed to pass headers through.

Answer 5

The egrep solution is simple and useful, but of course you depend on the header always containing 'PID' (a more than reasonable assumption, though) and the same string not ocurring elsewhere. I'm guessing this is enough for your needs, but in case someone wants an alternative there's sed.

Sed lets you just say "print the first line, then any line containing the pattern". For example:

ps auxwww | sed -n '1p; /PROCESS_NAME_TO_SEARCH/p;'

Add /sed -n/d; to filter sed itself out:

ps auxwww | sed -n '1p; /sed -n/d; /PROCESS_NAME_TO_SEARCH/p;'

Answer 6

you could get the pid with pgrep

pgrep PNetTNetServer

and then use ps with the pid

ps u 12345

or even combine the two into one command

ps u `pgrep PNetTNetServer`

This would show just the line you want, and include the header.

Answer 7

I wrote a small Perl program that will print

• the first line and all lines matching, if there are any matches, or
• nothing, if there are no matches.

I most often use it like ps | 1andre GMC, but it can also take file arguments (each file provides its own header line for matches made on lines from that file).



#!/usr/bin/perl

#
# 1andre <regexp> [<file> ...]
#
#   1 -           first ({1}st)
# and -                  {and}
#  re - (lines matching) {re}gexp
#
# If no <files> are given (or "-" is given as a <file>) stdin is
# used.
#
# If any lines from each <file> match the <regexp>, print the
# first line from that <file> and all the matching lines from
# that <file>.
#

use strict;
use warnings;

if(scalar @ARGV < 1) {
  printf STDERR "usage: %s <regexp> [<file> ...]\n", $0;
  exit 1;
}

my $re = shift;
my $header;

while(<>) {
  if($. == 1) {
    $header = $_;
  } elsif(m/$re/) {
    if(defined $header) {
      print $header;
      undef $header;
    }
    print;
  }
} continue {
  # close resets $. when we get to the end of each file that <> is processing
  close ARGV if eof;
}

Answer 8

This works for me at Solaris and several Linux flavors. it's pretty similar to the first:

clear ; ps aux | grep -v grep | grep -E 'COMMAND|PNetTNetServer'

It's a 2 command part:

• a) Clear the screen
• b) ps aux for the process
• b.1) First grep removes grep results
• b.2) Real value grep/search, COMMAND is because I need a field from the header and PNetTNetServer is all the command processes you are looking...

And the best thing (other example how I use it with multiple patterns) is:

clear ; ps aux | grep -v grep | grep -E 'COMMAND|du -sH|tmp_usage'

This search's a script that have tmp_usage and du command... And you can add more details every pipe. Output sample:

USER        PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
megauser   74707  0.0  0.0 113292  1492 pts/5    S+   16:17   0:00 /bin/bash /prj/mega/scripts/tmp_usage10_mega.sh 50 /prj/mega/
megauser   74718  0.0  0.0 113292   552 pts/5    S+   16:17   0:00 /bin/bash /prj/mega/scripts/tmp_usage10_mega.sh 50 /prj/mega/
megauser   74723  0.0  0.0 108356   616 pts/5    S+   16:17   0:00 xargs du -shH
megauser  117884  0.5  0.0 112912  5452 pts/5    D+   17:22   0:01 du -shH /prj/mega/dev /prj/mega/dv2 /prj/mega/sup /prj/mega/ppr /prj/mega/ts2

I hope you like it!

Juan