Pid of a commandline command

In order to find out anything about a process you need its pid. But how do you find that if all you have, typically, is the command that launched it or the name of the process? The problem is that if I launch a java program using java myprogram then the process listed in top and java -U <user> is "java". And if the system or someone else is running other java processes they will also be called "java". So pidof java or ps -C java -o pid= will retrieve many pids for "java" or only the latest one. It turns out there is a safe way to ascertain the pid of a process that was launched at the commandline. You can use pgrep, such that:

pgrep "java myprogram"

will print out the pid of that instance of java.

Addendum: A bit more complex than pgrep but just as effective is:

ps aux | awk '{if ($11 ~ /java myprogram/) {print $2}}'