Elite Linux commands: pgrep

In older times we use to run everything from command line, but now as Linux is getting better GUIs and userbase is increasing of non-techs, we are more using a mouse to do stuff than keyboards.

If we run the something through UI and if it goes non-responsive, generally a popup comes prompting to wait or force close, but even after trying to force close it stuck or popup is not coming, then we have to use a terminal to kill that process.

To kill a process from a terminal, either you should know full command name or pid, sometimes command name is different from what we assume, so killall command will not help. For such scenarios, we can use either use top -b -n 1 | grep string where string is something from command name or we can simply use pgrep -a string to find pid and kill with kill pid command.

There is also pkill command but it will kill before showing the results, so it might kill something undesired. It’s always better to use a two-step process for such tasks.

There are many more such amazing commands, some I will try cover in next stories.

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