How to get the process id (PID) of an app launched using `open` command on OSX?

Question

I've launched an application via the open command on the OSX command line like so:

open -a "/Applications/Adobe After Effects CC/Adobe After Effects CC.app"

I want to get the process id of that launched application. Is there any way to do this reliably on OSX? It doesn't seem open returns anything, so I'm not sure I can even pipe its result into something like ps to perform a grep operation. I thought that maybe since the app is launched via the terminal I would know which app is the frontmost, but am doubting the reliability of that solution. Any ideas?

Answer 1

After executing open -a, you can execute ps command. Doing a grep on the output of ps command gives info on process ID.

ps aux | grep -v grep |grep -i <application name> | awk '{print $2;}'

The one given below gives the elapsed time for the process.

ps aux -o etime,command | grep -v grep |grep -i <application name> | awk '{print $2, $12,$13}'

We can compare the elapsed time to know the pid of the recently launched one.

Answer 2

These days, pgrep -n $APPLICATION_NAME seems like the easiest way to accomplish this. From the man page:

-n    Select only the newest (most recently started) of the matching processes.
-o    Select only the oldest (least recently started) of the matching processes.