Knowledge Base

tl;dr

while true; do ps -ef | grep -iE "processname" | grep -viE "grep \-"; done | awk '!x[$10]++'

Discussion

Top shows everything currently running, and updates every so often (default is 2 seconds). But it has so much information for all the processes it does not show you the details of a single entry. ps -ef or ps auxe only shows you the processes at that instant. You can run that in a loop piped to grep, but then it continues to show you the same things again and again.

Watch for new processes and list them only once

You can use this snippet to show you new entries for the process you're looking for.

while true; do ps -ef | grep -iE "processname" | grep -viE "grep \-"; done | awk '!x[$10]++'

What this does is a while loop of all the processes. It updates constantly, because of the while true. The second grep command just prevents it from finding the first grep statement. Piping the whole thing to the special awk statement that removes duplicate lines makes it show only unique ones. And the awk $10 is the tenth column, which for me was the process parameter which is what I wanted to show the uniqueness of.