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] [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]] [-o
       omitpid[,omitpid..]..] 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 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.

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
       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.


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

AUTHOR
       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl



                                  01 Sep 1998                         PIDOF(8)