Question

Within a C-program I’m reading line by line the output of /bin/ps -fu1000 and searching for a string, for example “gnome”.
When I found the string (gnome), how can I get the pid?
The whole line is saved in a char buf[256].

cm       12556     1  0 10:47 ?        00:00:13 gnome-terminal

… and yes it’s part of a homework.

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After reading some comments:

I had to use C. Goal of the task is to write a program which will send signals to running processes, containing a specified string in its name.

My approach is like:

fp = popen("/bin/ps -fu1000", "r");
while(fgets(line, sizeof line, fp)){
  if(strstr(line, "gnome")){
    printf("found\n");
    /* do some nice stuff to get the PID */
  }
}

Answer 1

If it is in C try looking at the sscanf standard library function. Documentation should be available through either via a man page on a Unix type system such as Linux, or an online reference such as the GNU C Reference.