Question

I’m using awk to get the pid of a specific process by name.

#!/bin/sh

for pid in $(ps | awk '$4 == "foo" { print $1 }')
do
    i=1
    echo "killing foo at pid $pid"
    kill $pid && echo 'ok' || echo 'failed'
done

where ps output on OSX is something like:

$ ps
  PID TTY           TIME CMD
 1858 ttys000    0:00.15 -bash
 4148 ttys000    0:01.37 /a/b/c/foo

but my shell script only works if the process in the CMD column is exactly foo (no absolute paths).

I’m thinking I can use basename, but how do I call it from awk?

OR
Is there something like $4.endswith('foo') in awk?

Answer 1

awk can use regular expressions. So rather than $4 == "foo", you could do something like:

awk '$4 ~ /\/foo$/ { print $1 }'

The regular expression is between the / and /. \/foo$ says “a backslash followed by foo and then the end of the field.” In this case, your field is /a/b/c/foo, so it would match.