How to grep ps output with headers

ps -ef | egrep "GMC|PID"

Replace the "GMC" and ps switches as needed.

Example output:

root@xxxxx:~$ ps -ef | egrep "disk|PID"

UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
paremh1  12501 12466  0 18:31 pts/1    00:00:00 egrep disk|PID
root     14936     1  0 Apr26 ?        00:02:11 /usr/lib/udisks/udisks-daemon
root     14937 14936  0 Apr26 ?        00:00:03 udisks-daemon: not polling any devices

ps -e selects all processes, and ps -f is full-format listing which shows the column headers.

Thanks to geekosaur, I would like to use this command for your demands, rather than a separated command:

ps -ef | head -1; ps -ef | grep "your-pattern-goes-here"

The tricky is to make use of the ";" supported by the shell to chain the command.

Second column is the process id; 4th is when the process was created (this is usually the time your program started, but not always; consider execve() and friends); 6th is the amount of CPU time consumed. So it's been running for 8 days and used almost 7 days of CPU time, which I would consider worrisome.

Getting the header in the same invocation is tricky at best; I'd just do a separate ps | head -1. You might consider using ps's own selection methods or something like pgrep instead of grep, which isn't really designed to pass headers through.