Yeah, I always felt having to type the extra bit was strange, like maybe grep could have a switch to say "don't find grep" but I guess having a switch for such a specific use case, grepping processes, is overkill.

Anyway, it's just a reflex now to always:

  ps aux | grep <program> | grep -v grep

You can also surround each character in the program's name with square brackets.

    ps -ef | grep [p][r][o][g][r][a][m]

Yes, I never knew that. But I saw it in another post and as the sibling post mentions it's enough to surround just the first character with the brackets...

This is why I love HN, I learn stuff I never knew I wanted to know!

You only need surround one character.

One problem with pgrep is it has no option to ignore case.

Yes, I do sometimes have processes with camel-cased names which I may or may not remember exactly. So you:

  ps auwx | grep -i {lc-version-of-camel-cased-name}

Good to know, I always just `ps aux | grep [j]ava`