PIDOF

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 2020-12-22
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NAME

pidof -- find the process ID of a running program

SYNOPSIS

pidof [-s] [-c] [-q] [-w] [-x] [-o omitpid[,omitpid...]...] [-S separator] program [program...]

DESCRIPTION

Pidof finds the process id's (pids) of the named programs. It prints those id's on the standard output.

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.
-q: Quiet mode, suppress any output and only sets the exit status accordingly.
-w: Show also processes that do not have visible command line (e.g. kernel worker threads).
-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.
-S separator: Use separator as a separator put between pids. Used only when more than one pids are printed for the program. The -d option is an alias for this option for sysvinit pidof compatibility.

EXIT STATUS

0: At least one program was found with the requested name.
1: No program was found with the requested name.

BUGS

When using the -x option, pidof only has a simple method for detecting scripts and will miss scripts that, for example, use env. This limitation is due to how the scripts look in the proc filesystem.

AUTHOR

Jaromir Capik <jcapik@redhat.com>