trusty (8) pidof.8.gz

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NAME

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

SYNOPSIS

       pidof [-s] [-c] [-n] [-x] [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]]  [-o omitpid[,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.

       -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(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8), killall5(8)

AUTHOR

       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl

                                                   01 Sep 1998                                          PIDOF(8)