Modified grep command

When executing the command ps aux | grep -rI process, the displayed results appear as follows:

  8176  process
  8189  grep -rI process

The second entry in the result corresponds to the command we just executed. Although this is typically not problematic, it can lead to issues if you intend to use this command within a bash if statement to check whether process is running. In such cases, the command would return true even if process is not running.

To ensure that the command returns nothing when process is not running, you can modify it as follows:

ps aux | grep -rI [p]rocess

The addition of brackets in the regex causes grep to interpret the query in the same way, but it prevents the literal string [p]rocess from matching process_name. Consequently, the modified command produces the following desired output:

8176  process

This behavior is preferable for certain use cases.