Manual: 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 omitpid[,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 pro‐
       gram is on some systems used in run-level change scripts, especially when the system has a System-V  like  rc  struc‐
       ture.   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 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 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 zombie (Z) status.  Usually these processes are skipped  as  trying
	      to deal with them can cause pidof or related tools to hang.  Note: In the past pidof would ignore processes in
	      the  uninterruptable state (D), unless the -z flag was specified.	 This is no longer the case.  The pidof pro‐
	      gram will find and report processes in the D state whether -z is specified or not.

       -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(8); 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.  Other‐
       wise 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, respectively) 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

sysvinit						 01 Sep 1998						    PIDOF(8)