I am writing a script to monitor the CPU and MEM of any given process. For that i need to send in the name of the process to be monitored as a commandline argument. For example.
./monitorscript <pname>
I need to get the pid of the process in the script so that i can use a ps -p <pid>
inside.
How do i get the pid of a process given its process name?
I understand that there might be multiple processes in the same name. I just want to get the first process out of that list.
The answer above was mostly correct, just needed some tweaking for the different parameters in Mac OSX.
ps -A | grep [f]irefox | awk '{print $1}'