Getting PID by process name and user?

Hi Jochen,
If you didn't change "aUser" in anaxamander's command into the user on your machine that is running TextEdit, there won't be a match. However, even if you do, anaxamander's command won't find TextEdit because the command is too long for the standard terminal window. (80 characters wide) One could use the "-w" option to ps to prevent it from truncating the string. However, the longer the command, the greater the opportunity there is for a false match.

Besides that, if you're going to use awk, which I would, one might as well use that for the matching. With all of those considerations, I would use the following to get the process ID you want to kill:

ps -axo pid,user,ucomm | awk '{ if ( $2 == "<UserName>" && $3 == "TextEdit" ){ print $1 }}'

In my example, you would replace <UserName> with you own username.

As should be evident, there are many ways to do this in UNIX. The optimal way would depend on what you wanted to match.
--
Gary
~~~~
Be frank and explicit with your lawyer ... it is his business
to confuse the issue afterwards.

Hi anaxamander,
In most shells, the $USER environment variable contains the username of the "owner" of the shell process.
--
Gary
~~~~
We totally deny the allegations, and we're trying to identify
the allegators.

Hi Jochen,
Anaxamander was right on in his use of "kill". To do it with a variable as you suggest, use anaxamander's first method:

PID=`ps -axo pid,user,ucomm | awk '{ if ( $2 == "<UserName>" && $3 == "TextEdit" ){ print $1 }}'`
kill $PID

or you could do it directly as anaxamander did the second time:

kill `ps -axo pid,user,ucomm | awk '{ if ( $2 == "<UserName>" && $3 == "TextEdit" ){ print $1 }}'`

--
Gary
~~~~
The cost of feathers has risen, even down is up!

Jochen,
As anaxamander noted you can turn the result of a command into a varaible" by enclosing it in the tics above the tab key:``

set killvariable = `ps -axo pid,user,ucomm | awk '{ if ( $2 == "<UserName>" && $3 == "TextEdit" ){ print $1 }}' `
echo $killvariable

(note the tics above the tab key are not single quote marks, which would be the tics next to the enter key)

Reese

Gary, you are right on. However, with your ucomm, a carbon DiskTracker.app shows up as:

2065 aUser LaunchCFMApp

with the slight modification: "ps -acxo pid,user,command" it is:

2065 aUser DiskTracker 2.3

----------
I'm so used to everything being such a pain I usually find the home directory at /Users/`whoami`. I completely forget about $HOME.

killvariable=`ps -ajx | grep TextEdit | grep aUser | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
kill $killvariable

or

kill `ps -ajx | grep TextEdit | grep aUser | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

apparently, your aUser doesn't exist. How about:

aUser=`whoami`
kill `ps -ajx | grep TextEdit | grep $aUser | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

change aUser as needed

even though i see you received several answers to your problem. i thought that I would tack mine on to the list.

TextEditPID=`ps -** ${USER} | awk '$5 == "TextEdit" {print $1}'`