find the process id of an application in linux

In one of my previous posts, I talked about killing unresponsive processes in Linux. It is pretty straightforward to find the process ids of applications if you're the only user, but if that's not the case you have to find a clever way. Assume that we want to find the process id of bash. We write

ps -A

to the terminal for seeing all active processes but we don't have 1 hour to inspect all processes. We just want to see the process id of bash. We will use the pgrep command which's basically a grep variant for processes.

pgrep bash

will give us the process id (PID) of bash.