What is the meaning of "ps -aef | grep $(pwd)" command?
From the man page for ps:
-a Select all processes except both session leaders (see getsid(2)) and
processes not associated with a terminal.
-f Do full-format listing. This option can be combined
with many other UNIX-style options to add additional
columns. It also causes the command arguments to be
printed. When used with -L, the NLWP (number of
threads) and LWP (thread ID) columns will be added. See
the c option, the format keyword args, and the format
keyword comm.
-e Select all processes. Identical to -A.
grep is used to print lines matching a pattern
.
What it does
The command
ps -aef | grep `pwd`
prints out all the lines matching the output of the command pwd
(which will be the path your current working directory), from the output of ps -aef
.
e.g:
saji@geeklap:~$ pwd
/home/saji
saji@geeklap:~$ ps -aef | grep `pwd`
saji 2854 2814 0 09:51 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/saji/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-geeklap /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=ubuntu
saji 2855 2814 0 09:51 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --daemon --sh --write-env-file=/home/saji/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info-geeklap /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session gnome-session --session=ubuntu
saji 2879 1 0 09:51 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gvfs//gvfs-fuse-daemon -f /home/saji/.gvfs
saji 14242 14148 0 15:26 pts/7 00:00:00 grep --color=auto /home/saji
As you can see the output shows the lines matching my current working directory, which is /home/saji
.
Background info:
If a command is in $(...) or ...
, then the command is run and the output (what is printed to the screen) is caught and substituted to where the original $() or `` string was. So the actual command run is grep pwd.
For more information refer this link.(Thanks to @minerz029 for this information).
Do check out the following link for a detailed technical answer from the man pages itself:
http://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=ps+-aef+|+grep+%60pwd%60
ps -aef | grep $(pwd)
Searching,Getting and displaying full information about the list of processes which are associated with the working directory
and print the path of that directory.