ps: Clean way to only get parent processes?

Question

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         


        

Answer 1

Why do not you simply save the pid of the master in a file (pidfile) with the --pidfile option ? If it is not a viable solution you can give a custom name to the master process with --procname-master .

Using ps for that kind of things is highly unreliable (race conditions all over the place, and special cases invalidating parsing rules...)