May 25, 2009

Don’t grep grep!!!

Posted in Tips tagged grep, Linux, search at 10:20 pm by Karel MALBROUKOU

Well well, a linux user / admin who has a little respect for himself has to know that tool: grep.
Used for string searching, we can use it on the output of a command using the pipe character.
But, what happened when you do: ps x | grep firefox??

And yes, grep will grep himself:
$ ps x | grep firefox
8902 ? SNLl 59:29 /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox
9426 pts/9 SN+ 0:00 grep --colour=auto firefox


How could we fix this little cutie issue. We could use a sed… Yeah … or a head maybe… not that great either.

Or, we could hack grep!
Instead of using ps x | grep firefox, try ps x | grep [f]firefox!

Tell Me More!

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