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)