I have to show the PID, PPID and STATUS of the procceses on the system, but only the ones which PID starts with numbers in the range 5-8. So i tried something like this...
ps xao pid,ppid,s | grep ' 5' But then I don’t know how to do it for the range, I can make it work for one number, but not for all of them.
ps xao pid,ppid,s | grep '^ *[5-8]' If the PID is five digits, you don't have a space at the beginning of the line, hence the ' *' part after grep. '^'^ only searches at the beginning (thereby not selecting PPID is starting with 5,6,7,80 and. '[5-8]' handles the range of numbers you wanted (could also do '[5678]')
Try this :
ps xao pid,ppid,s | grep '^ *[5-8]' ^ means: start of line (or string)* is a quantifier (for preceding character) : zero or N[] is the meta-character to indicate a regex range, here 5 to 8