10.10. Number of Processes

ps ax | wc -l | tr -d " " OR ps ax | wc -l | awk '{print $1}' OR ps ax | wc -l | sed -e "s: ::g". In each case, tr or awk or sed is used to remove the undesirable whitespace.

Relative speed: the tr variant takes about 0.105 seconds on an unloaded 800 MHz Celeron with 100 processes. The others take very similar times.