This post covers getting the PID of a process by name with and without the sysutils/psmisc port.

Software Versions

$ date
February 19, 2016 at 07:57:31 PM JST
$ uname -vm
FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #0 r287598: Thu Sep 10 14:45:48 JST 2015     root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MIRAGE_KERNEL  amd64

Instructions

EDIT:

Just use pgrep. The following example uses pgrep in a script.

is_running.sh

#!/bin/sh

PROCESS_NAME=$1
USER=$(whoami)
if pgrep -q -U "${USER}" -x "${PROCESS_NAME}"
then
  echo "${PROCESS_NAME} is running as user '${USER}'."
else
  echo "${PROCESS_NAME} is not running as user '${USER}'."
fi

/EDIT

The easy way is to install the sysutils/psmisc port and use the pidof command.

portmaster sysutils/psmisc
PROCESS_NAME="sshd"
pidof "${PROCESS_NAME}"

The following can be used to get the information on all of the processes matching a name.

PROCESS_NAME="sshd" ; ps -aux | grep "${PROCESS_NAME}" | grep -v "grep"

The following can be used to get the PIDs of all processes matching a name.

PROCESS_NAME="sshd" ; ps -ax | grep "${PROCESS_NAME}" | grep -v "grep" | awk '{ print $1 }'

Something like the following can be used for control flow in a shell script. The -qs flags suppress grep output.

#!/bin/sh

PROCESS_NAME="sshd"
if ps -ax | grep "${PROCESS_NAME}" | grep -qsv "grep"
then
  echo "${PROCESS_NAME} is running."
else
  echo "${PROCESS_NAME} is not running."
fi

References

Primary Sources, Non-Peer-Reviewed

General Sources