Getting pids from ps -ef |grep keyword

I want to use ps -ef | grep "keyword" to determine the pid of a daemon process (there is a unique string in output of ps -ef in it).

I can kill the process with pkill keyword is there any command that returns the pid instead of killing it? (pidof or pgrep doesnt work)

You can use pgrep as long as you include the -f options. That makes pgrep match keywords in the whole command (including arguments) instead of just the process name.

pgrep -f keyword

From the man page:

> -f       The pattern is normally only matched against the process name. When -f is set, the full command line is used.

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If you really want to avoid pgrep, try:

ps -ef | awk '/[k]eyword/{print $2}'

Note the [] around the first letter of the keyword. That's a useful trick to avoid matching the awk command itself.

Try

ps -ef | grep "KEYWORD" | awk '{print $2}'

That command should give you the PID of the processes with KEYWORD in them. In this instance, awk is returning what is in the 2nd column from the output.

ps -ef | grep KEYWORD | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'

This is available on linux: pidof keyword

I use

ps -C "keyword" -o pid=

This command should give you a PID number.

To kill a process by a specific keyword you could create an alias in ~/.bashrc (linux) or ~/.bash_profile (mac).

alias killps="kill -9 `ps -ef | grep '[k]eyword' | awk '{print $2}'`"