pidof -- find the process ID of a running program.
pidof [-s] [-c] [-n] [-x] [-o
omitpid[,omitpid..]] [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]..]
program [program..]
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.
- -s
- Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one
pid.
- -c
- Only return process ids that are running with the same root directory.
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
located on network based file systems like NFS. Instead of using
this option the the variable PIDOF_NETFS may be set and
exported.
- -x
- Scripts too - this causes the program to also return process id's of
shells running the named scripts.
- -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.
- 0
- At least one program was found with the requested name.
- 1
- No program was found with the requested name.
pidof is actually the same program as killall5; the program
behaves according 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 that
the executable name of running processes is calculated with
readlink(2), so symbolic links to executables will also match.
shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8),
killall5(8)
Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl