Question

assuming that I know the PID of a process and want to do a search in ps -A, how do I do it? I tried doing this:

echo "Enter PID to search: "
read PID
search=$(ps -A | grep -v PID | awk '{print $1}') 

This returns me with a long list of PIDs. So how can I get use each individual value of the output and do:

if [ "$PID" = "*each_value_in_search_list*" ]; then
........

In this case i’m trying to compare what the user enters with the output of my command, so how do I do it? Am I doing the correct way in the first place? Or is there any other way to do this?

Thanks for your help, everyone who answered this question. (:

Answer 1

The -v switch for grep performs an inverted search, in other words you will get everything you DON’T want. After a variable is set, you should also reference it prefixed with $.

try this

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter PID to search: "
read PID
search=$(ps --pid $PID -o comm=)

if [ $search ]
    then
        echo "Program: $search"
    else
        echo "No program found with PID: $PID"
fi