I don't think this is specific to catalina. In my example, catalina was just an example of a program I was searching for. the output is actually coming from ps -aux. So, it looks like it would always be column 2 unless ps was configured to reorder the columns.

I'm also a newbie with awk. In my original post I mentioned that I would also like to have "catalina" be a parameter that I could pass into the script. If I wanted to do this search for some other application, say httpd for example, would there be an easy way to pass that in as a parameter to the script? I was thinking that using the form of

Code:

grep $1 |grep -v grep

would make it easier to replace the parameter, "catalina" in this example, with a parameter passed into the script rather than having to make the script wrap [] around the first character of $1.

What would the appropriate awk command be to search for the passed in parameter "$1" instead of searching for "/[c]atalina/" if I don't use the grep | grep -v form?

Also, is there a way to do this with xargs?