So another approach is to write a regular expression that matches exactly xfce but is written differently. Grep without -F treats its pattern as a regular expression rather than a fixed string. One common way to remove this distraction is to add another pipe to grep -v grep: ps x | grep xfce | grep -v grep I'm looking for information on processes that were already running when I examined what was running, not the process that's only running because of my effort to examine what is running. My grep command was shown in the output, but it's not what I'm looking for. For example, I might be looking for running programs whose names, paths, or command-line arguments suggest they're related to Xfce: ps x | grep xfceĢ958 ? S 0:00 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/xfconf/xfconfdģ1901 pts/1 S+ 0:00 grep -color=auto xfce Grep -v grep (or grep -v 'grep' or grep -v 'grep') often appears on the right side of a pipe whose left side is a ps command.

But in most cases where grep -v grep actually appears, this is no coincidence. See man grep for details.Īs far as the grep utility is itself concerned, it's unimportant that the pattern grep passed to it as an argument is the same as its name. Without -v, it would output only the lines in which grep does appear. Grep -v 'grep' takes input line by line, and outputs only the lines in which grep does not appear.

Grep meaning in vnc