Linux

I'm not really sure what it is you're asking for here. As another commenter said, ps outputs a list of newline separated entries (using \n, the standard LF character). I even ran some sanity checks to make sure it wasn't using \r\n (CR LF) with the following:

$ ps aux | grep $USER | tr -cd "\n" | wc -m
14
$ ps aux | grep $USER | tr -cd "\r" | wc -m
0

The output of ps aux | grep $USER is consistent with the formatting of ps aux. I also found that ps aux | grep $USER was consistent with ps -fp $(pgrep -d, -u $USER) except that ps -fp $(pgrep -d, -u $USER) shows the header (UID PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME CMD), does not show the processes related to the command (entries of ps aux and grep --color=auto $USER), and does not show grep's keyword matching by highlighting all matches within a line. It is otherwise completely identical.

Can you provide the output that you are getting that is unsatisfactory to you? I don't think I can otherwise understand where the issue is.

tbh you should prolly use pgrep instead of piping ps into grep

ps outputs a newline after every entry. What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you have a username that contains a newline character? If so… why?!

what do you mean the output doesnt keep the LF? what LF?

ps also has -u and -U switches to filter by users

If I do ps aux | grep root, then the newline is preserved. So I'm not sure what exactly the problem is. There is a user option for ps, but it does not work with aux, ps --user root . You can ps ax --user root, but I'm not sure if this output is what you want.

Btw if you grep, then I recommend using ^user , so it only matches the beginning of each line (the actual username), as ps aux | \grep ^root (notice the backslash). Do you have an alias for grep? Try \grep instead. The backslash in front of the command will use the actual command and ignore your alias.