Re: Can Zsh do this for me?

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@yahoo.co.uk>]

DervishD wrote:

>     I'm writing a command to kill a process by name, not by PID, just
> like 'pidof' but without using 'pidof' ;))) It's pretty easy using
> the ps command and a pipeline. Right know, it can be written like
> this:
> 
>     ps xh | grep name | tr -s " " | cut -d " " -f 2
> 

This doesn't seem to work for PIDs >= 10000 where there is no initial
space in the ps listing.

>     Since it will be called by root to kill root processes, it will
> do, and with my ps binary, the options are correct. But I don't want
> to start four processes just to get the pid of one of them. I can use
> my /proc filesystem, but I was wondering if Zsh has some facility to
> get the process ID using the command name, or if I can write the
> above pipeline in a shorter form using some Zsh capability.

You can write the command-line as:
    ${${${(M)${(f)"$(ps xh)"}:#*$name*}## #}%% *}

(M) and :# does the grep. ## # removes initial space and the %% * does
the job of cut.

Use $~name if you'd like to use patterns for name. And if you only want
one PID, use [1] on the end of it all.

>     BTW, I want to write a 'ps' command on my own because I don't
> like the procps one available for Linux, nor the others out there,
> and I think that with the zsh/stat module I could do it in a shell
> script :)))

I'm not quite sure how you'd do that using zsh/stat (using /proc?) but
good luck with it.

Oliver