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



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

SYNOPSIS
       pidof [-s] [-c] [-x] [-m] [-o omitpid] [-o 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.

       -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.

       -m     When used with -o, will also omit any processes that have the same argv[0] and argv[1] as any  explicitly  omitted
              process  ids.  This  can be used to avoid multiple shell scripts concurrently calling pidof returning each other's
              pids.

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, miquelsATcistron.nl



                                                           01 Sep 1998                                                  PIDOF(8)