Find linux process with bash

If you ever found yourself googling how to find active processes in linux, or process with the highest CPU, save this post as a reference, and save code into the script.

COMMANDS:

ps aux
#=> list processes

grep 'firefox'
#=> show firefox processes

awk *opts
#=> choose what we want to print

We will use this simple commands, so let's make a script for this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

#  Define 'help' banner
function print_help() {
  echo -e "--------------------------------------------------------------"
  echo -e " - procfind will print the highest CPU% processes"
  echo -e " - procfind firefox - will print firefox processes"
  echo -e "--------------------------------------------------------------"
}

  #  max number of processes to show
  processes="10"

  if [ "$1" == "-h" ] || [ "$1" == "--help" ]; then
    print_help
    exit

  else

    # If first argument is passed as string, search processes for that arg
    echo "CPU |PID |MEM |START |COMMAND"
    ps aux | grep "$1"| awk '{print $3,$2,$4,$9,$11}' | sort -rn | head -n "$processes"
  fi
  exit

Save script as you want (procfind) and give it executable permissions with sudo chmod +x procfind. No .sh at the end because we defined our environment #!/usr/bin/env bash.

Now if we run ./procfind -h, we will get:

------------------------------------------------------------
 - ./procfind will print the highest CPU% processes
 - ./procfind firefox - will print firefox processes
------------------------------------------------------------

If we run ./procfind firefox:

CPU |PID |MEM |START |COMMAND
20.2 24281 10.1 16:04 /home/USERNAME/PATH/tor-browser_en-USA/Browser/firefox.real
11.8 24209 12.5 16:03 ./firefox.real
1.9 24325 9.8 16:04 /home/USERNAME/PATH/tor-browser_en-USA/Browser/firefox.real
1.4 24361 5.2 16:04 /home/USERNAME/PATH/tor-browser_en-USA/Browser/firefox.real
0.7 31245 6.0 18:25 /home/USERNAME/PATH/tor-browser_en-USA/Browser/firefox.real
0.0 376 0.0 19:21 grep