Lua, exception does not work on line end

Maybe exception is not the correct term, but I'm talking about using the following in lua's string.find () function:

[^exclude]

      

        
        
        
      

    

It doesn't seem to work if the character is not followed by anything, IE is the last character in the line.

Specifically, I am getting a list of running processes and trying to analyze them myself using LUA.

root@OpenWrt:/# ps | grep mpd
 5427 root     21620 S    mpd /etc/mpd2.conf
 5437 root     25660 S    mpd

      

        
        
        
      

    

It wouldn't be a problem if I could expect \ n every time, but sometimes ps doesn't list itself, which creates this problem. I want to combine:

5437 root     25660 S    mpd

      

        
        
        
      

    

From this I will choose the PID for the kill command. I am running an OpenWRT build that doesn't support regex or exact parameters on killall, otherwise I would just do it.

(%d+ root%s+%d+ S%s+mpd[^ ])

      

        
        
        
      

    

The above pattern doesn't work unfortunately. This is because there is no character after the last character in the last line in my opinion. I've also tried:

(%d+ root%s+%d+ S%s+mpd$)

      

        
        
        
      

    

The above template returns nil.

(%d+ root%s+%d+ S%s+mpd[^ ]?)

      

        
        
        
      

    

The above template returns the first process (5427)

Maybe there is a better way to do this, or just a simple template change I can do to get it working, but I can't find one that will only capture the correct process. I cannot turn off PID or VSZ as they are variables. Maybe I'll have to see if I can compile OpenWRT with better killall support.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this, and if it's a duplicate, I'm sorry, but I couldn't find anything similar to my predicament. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!