service; ps & grep help

[James Pifer]

I could use a little help with ps and grep. When running a command like:

# ps -ewf | grep sendmail
root      2730     1  0 Jul14 ?        00:00:01 sendmail: accepting connections
smmsp     2739     1  0 Jul14 ?        00:00:00 sendmail: Queue runner at 01:00:00 for /var/spool/clientmqueue
root      6500  6362  0 07:51 pts/3    00:00:00 grep sendmail

Is there any way to run this command and get these results, but exclude
the actual grep itself, which is the last line?

A little background, I have a java based application that I've used a
custom start and stop script for. Basically the stop script does:
stop() {
        for pid in `ps -efww | grep myapp | grep -v grep | cut -b 10-15`;do
                #echo $pid
                kill -9 $pid
        done
    RETVAL=$?
    return $RETVAL
}

This has worked for years, but for some reason it has stopped working. I
think it may be because the process is killing itself before it kills
the app?

I assume the correct way to do this is store the pid in a file that you
reference, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. 

Any help is appreciated. 

Thanks,
James