ps ax | wc -l | tr -d " " OR ps ax | wc -l | awk '{print $1}' OR ps ax | wc -l | sed -e "s: ::g". In each case, tr or awk or sed is used to remove the undesirable whitespace.
Relative speed: any one of these variants takes about 0.9 seconds on an unloaded 486SX25. [Web Specs: Z shell] .:: google-site-indexing-submission.vercel.app ::. .:: slackcommunity.com ::. .:: fr.enrollbusiness.com ::. [Developer Guide: Keras] .:: docs.google.com ::.