Excluding grep from process list

grep's -v switch reverses the result, excluding it from the queue. So make it like:

ps aux | grep daemon_name | grep -v "grep daemon_name" | awk "{ print \$2 }"

Upd. You can also use -C switch to specify command name like so:

ps -C daemon_name -o pid=

The latter -o determines which columns of the information you want in the listing. pid lists only the process id column. And the equal sign = after pid means there will be no column title for that one, so you get only the clear numbers - PID's.

Hope this helps.

You can use a character class trick. "[d]" does not match "[d]" only "d".

 ps aux | grep [d]aemon_name | awk "{ print \$2 }"

I prefer this to using | grep -v grep.

Avoid parsing ps's output if there are more reliable alternatives.

pgrep daemon_name
pidof daemon_name

The ps -C option is not universal on all Unix based systems but if it works on your systems. Instead I would avoid grep altogether:

ps aux | awk '/daemon_name/ && !/awk/ { print $2 }'

No need to escape anything in single quotation marks. ps aux will give you the full list of processes on most Unix based systems and awk is typically installed by default.