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] 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 PIDs 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 variable PIDOF_NETFS
              may be set and exported.

       -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  uninterruptible  (D)  or  zombie  (Z)
              status.  Usually  these processes are skipped as trying to deal with them can cause
              pidof to hang.

       -d sep Tells pidof to use sep as an output separator if more than one PID  is  shown.  The
              default separator 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; 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 detect 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, miquels@cistron.nl

                                           01 Sep 1998                                   PIDOF(8)