flag to 'ps' command that can filter on arguments?

Question

I know the argument "-C" which can filter on the command.

But in my scenario I may have some processes with the same process name and different args.

How to filter on these args?

(I know I could pipe to grep later, but that is not 100% accurate. I.e.: when an arg may contain another arg, such as if I want to filter by the arg "bar" in these list:

+---------+---------+-----------+
| Process | Command | Arguments |
+---------+---------+-----------+
| 23      | foo     | bar       |
| 48      | foo     | barbaz    |
+---------+---------+-----------+

PS: I'm guessing most answers are going to recommend me to use "pgrep" instead of "ps", but I would like to avoid this if possible.

Answer 1

I don't think you can achieve that using ps alone. You're right that filtering using grep is not ideal, but if you're willing to give pgrep a chance then you can come quite close to your requirement with:

ps -p $(pgrep -f bar -d',')

The -f option makes pgrep search the full command line (instead of only the process name), while the -d option specifies the delimiter to use to string the pids together.

Passing the pid list to ps thus limits the output to those that contain the keyword in the full command (which includes the arguments).

In your example where you want to match "foo bar" but not "foo barbaz", you search for an exact match with:

ps -p $(pgrep -f "foo bar$" -d',')   # Note the eol anchor '$'

Answer 2

I do not believe that such an option exists - at least it does not exist in my version of ps. I doubt that many ps implementations out there have such an option - the command name is pretty straight-forward to define, which is definitely not the case when it comes down to command arguments.

In any case, the Unix philosophy is to chain many simple tools (e.g. ps and grep) to perform more complex tasks. One could argue that even ps -C is pushing it - in fact I believe that the MacOS X ps does not have such an option.

What exactly are you trying to do? What is the context to your question? Because, from my experience, in 99% of the cases where people are automating stuff by parsing the output of ps they are going about whatever they are doing the wrong way...