These two litte commands can make the life of an administrator much easier, but most admins aren’t even aware of their existence. pgrep searches the process table and returns a list of PIDs matching the search pattern. Using the -fl option, one can extend the search to the full argument list of the processes. This is equivalent to ps ax | grep, but you don’t get the PID of its own command back as a search result! The well known options -v, -i of grep work as expected, as well as the options of ps, like -t, -u, -g. pkill acts much like killall, but with the power of pgrep added to it. All in all these tools come in handy in shell-scripts or as a quicker alternative to ps ax | grep.