Bash – List of running processes

bashprocessps

There is a top command to show running processes. I would like to print sorted list of unique values in field COMMAND. There is my solution for this task 

$ top -b -n 1 | tail -n+8 | awk '{print $12}' | cut -d'/' -f 1 |  sort | uniq

However, this is too wordy command for so simple purpose. Is there a simpler solution for the task?

PS: I can use ps instead of top, but it returns too noisy format:chrome vs /opt/google/chrome/chrome --type=renderer --enable- features=LinuxObsoleteSystemIsEndOfTheLine<LinuxObsoleteSystemIsEndOfTheLine --lang=en-US --force-… this is just beginning of command.

Best Answer

I strongly recommend pouring over through the documentation for ps.

These might be an interesting start:

ps -eo comm=,

or

ps -eo cmd=,

You probably want the first one.

If you want absolutely fine-grained control, read the Name: line from /proc/nnnnnn/status (or parse the string between the parens in stat) where nnnnn represents all-numbers. For the full commandline, read /proc/nnnnnn/cmdline, and translate the NUL bytes in the file to space characters.

Note that ps on BSD (provided as part of that ecosystem) is a little different to Linux's version (supplied to Linux by the procps-ng project) and the two interpret their options a little differently. Worth noting if you're ever on *BSD.

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