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] pro‐
       gram [program...]

DESCRIPTION
       pidof finds the process id's (PIDs) of the named programs.  It prints those id's on the standard out‐
       put.  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 PIDs that are running with the same root directory.  This  option  is	 ig‐
	      nored  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 ex‐
	      ported.

       -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 program 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 sep‐
	      arator 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.  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 the executable name of
       running processes is calculated with readlink(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 de‐
       tect 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)