linebreaks between results in grep

Question

I need to occasionally monitor a spider that I have running on my server. I'm testing it to see how many iterations of it are running concurrently and to see if any of them are hanging.

I use this:

echo `ps -ewwo args | grep '^[^ ]*curl'`

and the output is all in one line. If I change that to

echo `ps -ewwo args | grep -n '^[^ ]*curl'`

I get the line numbers, but the output is still all in one line. How do I get it to break the results into separate lines?

As a test, I did something like

grep "br" /home/user/www/index.php

and it found many instances and output them each on a separate line, just like I want I to.

Michael is correct, your use of echo with no double quotes is the root cause of your whitespace problems. — glenn jackman, Dec 18 '13 at 20:33
At this point, I am pretty much a copy and paste admin, so I found that online. I tried taking it out of the echo and my output was NULL (I think I got that from https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=791164 ) — TecBrat, Dec 18 '13 at 20:34
I tried it again. I must have made a mistake when I pulled it out of the echo before. When I just did `ps -ewwo args | grep -n '^[^ ]*curl'` it worked — TecBrat, Dec 18 '13 at 20:38
Mickael, If you'll make that an answer, I'll give you credit for it. — TecBrat, Dec 18 '13 at 20:39
Please see [Process Mananagement](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ProcessManagement) — Dennis Williamson, Dec 22 '13 at 18:38

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 26 '14 at 17:58

If you don't quote the output of a `...` subshell, the linebreaks will be replaced with spaces. If you want the linebreaks then don't use a `...` subshell, just run the commands and let them do the outputting by themselves, without using echo at all, for example:

ps -ewwo args | grep '^[^ ]*curl'
ps -ewwo args | grep -n '^[^ ]*curl'

linebreaks between results in grep

1 Answers1