ps aux | grep returns pid for itself too

Question

I am using this command to get the process ID of another command:

ps aux | grep 7000.conf | awk \'{print $2}\'

This will return two PIDs:

Answer 1

ps aux | grep "[7]000.conf" will work as well.

Answer 2

In this particular case, escaping the . to what I assume it was meant to do should work:

ps aux | grep '7000\.conf' | awk '{print $2}'

Alternatively, exclude grep:

ps aux | grep 7000.conf | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'