I use ps ef and ps rf a lot. Here is a sample output for ps rf: PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 3476 pts/0 S 0:00 su ... 3477 pts/0 S 0:02 \_ bash 8062 pts/0 T 1:16 \_ emacs -nw ... 15733 pts/0 R+ 0:00 \_ ps xf 15237 ? S 0:00 uwsgi ... 15293 ? S 0:00 \_ uwsgi ... 15294 ? S 0:00 \_ uwsgi ... And today I needed to retrieve only the master process of uwsgi in a script (so I want only 15237 but not 15293 nor 15294). As of today, I tried some ps rf | grep -v ' \\_ '... but I would like a cleaner way. I also came accross another solution from unix.com's forums: ps xf | sed '1d' | while read pid tty stat time command ; do [ -n "$(echo $command | egrep '^uwsgi')" ] && echo $pid ; done But still a lot of pipes and ugly tricks. Is there really no ps option or cleaner tricks (maybe using awk) to accomplish that?