More elegant "ps aux | grep -v grep"

Use pgrep. It's more reliable.

The usual technique is this:

ps aux | egrep '[t]erminal'

This will match lines containing terminal, which egrep '[t]erminal' does not! It also works on many flavours of Unix.

This answer builds upon a prior pgrep answer. It also builds upon another answer combining the use of ps with pgrep. Here are some pertinent training examples:

$ pgrep -lf sshd
1902 sshd

$ pgrep -f sshd
1902

$ ps up $(pgrep -f sshd)
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      1902  0.0  0.1  82560  3580 ?        Ss   Oct20   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D

$ ps up $(pgrep -f sshddd)
error: list of process IDs must follow p
[stderr output truncated]

$ ps up $(pgrep -f sshddd) 2>&-
[no output]

The above can be used as a function:

$ psgrep() { ps up $(pgrep -f $@) 2>&-; }

$ psgrep sshd
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      1902  0.0  0.1  82560  3580 ?        Ss   Oct20   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D

Compare with using ps with grep. The useful header row is not printed:

$  ps aux | grep [s]shd
root      1902  0.0  0.1  82560  3580 ?        Ss   Oct20   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd -D