pidof

PIDOF(8)              Linux System Administrator's Manual             PIDOF(8)

NAME
       pidof -- find the process ID of a running program.

SYNOPSIS
       pidof  [-s]  [-c]  [-n]  [-x] [-z] [-o omitpid[,omitpid...]]  [-o omit-
       pid[,omitpid...]...]  [-d sep] program [program...]

DESCRIPTION
       Pidof finds the process id's (PIDs) of the named  programs.  It  prints
       those id's on the standard output. This program is on some systems used
       in run-level change scripts, especially when the system has a  System-V
       like   rc  structure.  In  that  case  these  scripts  are  located  in
       /etc/rc?.d, where ? is the runlevel. If the system  has  a  start-stop-
       daemon (8) program that should be used instead.

OPTIONS
       -s     Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one pid.

       -c     Only return process PIDs that are running with the same root di-
              rectory.  This option is ignored for  non-root  users,  as  they
              will  be unable to check the current root directory of processes
              they do not own.

       -n     Avoid stat(2) system function call on all binaries which are lo-
              cated  on network based file systems like NFS.  Instead of using
              this option the variable PIDOF_NETFS may be set and exported.

       -q     Do not display matched PIDs to standard out. Simply exit with  a
              status  of  true or false to indicate whether a matching PID was
              found.

       -x     Scripts too - this causes the program  to  also  return  process
              id's of shells running the named scripts.

       -z     Try  to  detect processes which are stuck in uninterruptible (D)
              or zombie (Z) status. Usually these  processes  are  skipped  as
              trying to deal with them can cause pidof to hang.

       -d sep Tells  pidof  to use sep as an output separator if more than one
              PID is shown. The default separator is a space.

       -o omitpid
              Tells pidof to omit processes with that process id. The  special
              pid  %PPID  can  be used to name the parent process of the pidof
              program, in other words the calling shell or shell script.

EXIT STATUS
       0      At least one program was found with the requested name.

       1      No program was found with the requested name.

NOTES
       pidof is actually the same program as killall5; the program behaves ac-
       cording to the name under which it is called.

       When  pidof  is  invoked  with a full pathname to the program it should
       find the pid of, it is reasonably safe. Otherwise it is  possible  that
       it  returns  PIDs of running programs that happen to have the same name
       as the program you're after but are actually other programs. Note  that
       the  executable  name  of  running  processes  is calculated with read-
       link(2), so symbolic links to executables will also match.

       Zombie processes or processes in disk sleep (states Z  and  D,  respec-
       tively)  are  ignored,  as  attempts  to access the stats of these will
       sometimes fail.  The -z flag (see above) tells pidof to try  to  detect
       these sleeping and zombie processes, at the risk of failing or hanging.

SEE ALSO
       shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8), killall5(8)

AUTHOR
       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl

                                  01 Sep 1998                         PIDOF(8)