pidof
- find the process ID of a running program.
see also :
shutdown - init - halt - reboot - killall5
Synopsis
pidof
[-s] [-c] [-n]
[-x] [-o
omitpid[,omitpid..]] [-o
omitpid[,omitpid..]..] program
[program..]
add an example, a script, a trick and tips
examples
source
read PROCESS_NAME
pidof $PROCESS_NAME
pidof $PROCESS_NAME | xargs
kill -9
source
function running ()
{
pidof "$@" &>/dev/null
}
source
pidof () {
ps -C $1 -o pid= }
source
pid=`pidof java`
kill -9 $pid
pid=`pidof mysqld`
kill -9 $pid
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 ,
init , halt , reboot ,
killall5
author
Miquel van
Smoorenburg, miquels[:at:]cistron[:dot:]nl