Question

I want to attach to a running process using ‘ddd’, what I manually do is:

# ps -ax | grep PROCESS_NAME

Then I get a list and the pid, then I type:

# ddd PROCESS_NAME THE_PID

Is there is a way to type just one command directly?

Remark: When I type ps -ax | grep PROCESS_NAME, grep will match both the process and grep command line itself.

Answer 1

There is an easy way to get rid of the grep process:

ps -ax | grep PROCESS_NAME | grep -v ' grep '

(as long as the process you’re trying to find doesn’t include the string " grep ").

So something like this should work in a script (again, assuming there’s only one copy running):

pid=$(ps -ax | grep $1 | grep -v ' grep ' | awk '{print $1}')
ddd $1 ${pid}

If you call your script dddproc, you can call it with:

dddproc myprogramname

Although I’d add some sanity checks such as detecting if there’s zero or more than one process returned from ps and ensuring the user supplies an argument.