psgrep's Introduction

psgrep

Select processes with the power of Perl expressions!

Basic Usage: grepping

The simple case is simple:

psgrep httpd

That does a regular expression match against the command and arguments shown by ps. On my system, it comes back with:

PID  COMMAND
51   /usr/sbin/httpd -D FOREGROUND -D WEBSHARING_ON
94   /usr/sbin/httpd -D FOREGROUND -D WEBSHARING_ON
2272 /usr/sbin/httpd -D FOREGROUND -D WEBSHARING_ON

Since it's a Perl regex, you can also do stuff like this:

psgrep '^\/System.*\.app\W'  # maybe not so basic

That comes back with results like:

PID   COMMAND
4257  /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
4532  /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/MacOS/Dock

Other Operations

It's not just grep. You can use most of Perl's comparison operators.

psgrep 'user eq ahall'    # ahall's processes
psgrep 'ppid > 1'         # processes not parented by init (on Unix)
psgrep 'state =~ [Z]'     # zombies

Putting it all together:

psgrep perl 'uid != 0' 'pcpu > 5' # non-root perl scripts using > 5% of cpu

Output

Output looks like ps's. (It essentially is ps's.) Any field you compare against automatically gets printed.

-o adds fields to output, just like ps
-p prints only matching PIDs, with no header (for script/pipeline use)

Compatibility

It should work with any ps that supports the BSD-style axw options and the POSIX/SUS -o format option. Tested with Perl 5.8.1 and newer, and requires no non-core modules. Just take the script with you wherever you need it.