'pgrep -c' in MacOS terminal I would like to translate the following command, which works in linux Ubuntu and CentOS, to work in MacOS:


  echo $(pgrep -c -P$$)


This is designed to be called from within a python script:


  subprocess.check_output("echo $(pgrep -c -P$$)", shell=True)


and run new jobs within a loop when the number of processes falls below a threshold.

The issue is that the MacOS version of pgrep does not have a -c option.

Many thanks for your help!
If you're looking for the count of child processes, you can use pgrep -P &lt;pid&gt; | wc -l since the output is on PID per line and wc -l outputs the line count.