How to get pgrep to display full process info

Question

Is there any way to get pgrep to give me all the info about each process that ps does? I know I can pipe ps through grep but that's a lot of typing and it also gives me the grep process itself which I don't want.

Answer 1

pgrep's output options are pretty limited. You will almost certainly need to send it back through ps to get the important information out. You could automate this by using a bash function in your ~/.bashrc.

function ppgrep() { pgrep "$@" | xargs --no-run-if-empty ps fp; }

Then call the command with.

ppgrep <pattern>

Answer 2

Combine pgrep with ps using xargs!

pgrep <your pgrep-criteria> | xargs ps <your ps options> -p

For example try

pgrep -u user | xargs ps -f -p

to get a full process list of user. Option -u user limits pgrep to the user given (as a number or name) while the ps options -f -p request a full format listing for the selected PID.

It's nice that you keep the first line with the column names. grep always drops the column names.

Answer 3

The following only gives you PID + full command-line. For "all the info ps does", see other answers...

Most linuxes use procps-ng. Since 3.3.4 (released in 2012), pgrep -a (--list-full) shows the full command line.
Note: By default pgrep only matches the pattern you give against the executable name. If you want to match against the full command line (as grepping ps does), add the -f (--full) option.

In older versions (including the original procps project), -l option showed info but it's behavior varied:

• pgrep -fl matched the pattern against full command line and showed the full command line.
• pgrep -l alone matched only executable name and showed only executable name.
  If you don't want full match, you couldn't see the full command line :-( [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=526355#15]

Not sure what code *BSD use but their man page documents the old -fl behavior.

Unfortunately you can't even use -fl portably - in recent procps-ng, -f (--list-name) always prints only the executable name.

Answer 4

Linux pgrep

For the GNU version of pgrep long + fuzzy output is achieved with -af and the string must be case-sensitive (i.e. there is no option for case-insensitivity).

$ pgrep -af apache
OUTPUT:
    1748 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

Man page:

-a, --list-full
    List  the  full  command line as well as the process ID.  (pgrep only.)
-f, --full
    The pattern is normally only matched against the process name.

    When -f is set, the full command  line is used.

MacOS/BSD pgrep

On MacOS/BSD -l (long output) in combination with -f (match against full argument lists) will display the complete command (-i adds case-insensitivity):

$ /usr/bin/pgrep -fil ssh
OUTPUT:
    33770 ssh: dinsdale@192.168.1.42-22 [mux] t

man page:

-l  Long output.  For pgrep, print the
    process name in addition to the
    process ID for each matching
    process.  If used in conjunction
    with -f, print the process ID and
    the full argument list for each
    matching process.  For pkill, dis-
    play the kill command used for
    each process killed.

❗️NOTE: GNU pgrep can be installed on MacOS with brew install pgrep — this will expose the GNU flavour under /usr/local/bin/pgrep and depending on how you defined your $PATH it might break code which relies on the BSD syntax of pgrep.

Answer 5

Use the -v option to grep - it returns everything BUT the requested pattern.

ps -ef | grep <process> | grep -v grep

Answer 6

I know it is an old topic. However, It was useful to me, and I would like to share what I did that worked. It is pretty straightforward for beginner (like me) and may help others:

[root@2a8ad900f55e tmp]# pgrep -f '(^|/)db2fmcd'|xargs ps |awk '{print $5}'
COMMAND
/opt/ibm/db2/V11.5/bin/db2fmcd

Note that the column "CMD" was also showed, but the question of this thread was to show the command, and not only the command. Anyway, I am trying to remove that column and will update my post with the command too.

Note: The arguments "--no-headers and -o command" isolated the output only to the command. And I could remove the awk print.

[root@2a8ad900f55e tmp]# pgrep -f '(^|/)db2fmcd'|xargs ps -o command --no-headers
/opt/ibm/db2/V11.5/bin/db2fmcd
[root@2a8ad900f55e tmp]#

Answer 7

I don't think there is, the most information you can get is the name and process id by using the -l option to pgrep.

ps supports all sorts of formatting options, so I would just make an alias for what you want to save the typing. A simple way to exclude the grep process from the output us to include an additional pipe to grep -v grep to exclude any grep processes.

Answer 8

In order to eliminate the grep process, you can use brackets as part of your pattern:

ps -ef | grep '[t]ty'

You can do this with ps and pgrep:

ps -fp $(pgrep -d, tty)

Answer 9

This will help you I guess:

ps auxww