How can I prevent 'grep' from showing up in ps results?

Turns out there's a solution found in keychain.

$ ps aux | grep "[f]nord"

By putting the brackets around the letter and quotes around the string you search for the regex, which says, "Find the character 'f' followed by 'nord'."

But since you put the brackets in the pattern 'f' is now followed by ']', so grep won't show up in the results list. Neato!

Another option I use (especially just to look if a process is running) is the pgrep command. This will search for a matching process, but not list a grep line for the search. I like it because it is a quick way of search, without regexing or escaping anything.

pgrep fnord

The ideal solution is the one presented by BriGuy

pgrep fnord 

But if you do not want to do that, you can just exclude all lines that matches with grep with:

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep "fnord"