Greater grokking of pgrep

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Process Finder

Pgrep is a valuable tool for tracking down processes from the command line.

Grep has become the standard name for any search tool that uses regular expressions. The original grep utility was a classic Unix tool that searched a file (or multiple files) for a string of alphanumeric characters. By adding wildcard characters and other regular expressions, the user could wield grep with great subtlety and power to find important information in logfiles, text files, and even output from other commands.

Linux power users and admins still use grep to search for system information. In fact, a whole family of grep-based tools have evolved to help users monitor and manage Linux systems. Tools such as egrep, fgrep, cgrep, and agrep all have slightly different features but are each tailored to a specific role as a search utility. What tool should you use to discover information about processes running on the system? What about pgrep [1]?

A typical Linux system might have 40-50 processes running at any moment. Even your little Raspberry Pi can have dozens of processes running at once. A process is any task executing on the computer, which might include an essential service running on the operating system, a server application offering services to the network, or even a desktop productivity application.

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