Section 1 · User commands

pidof.1

Package: procps-ng

PIDOF

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
EXIT STATUS
BUGS
SEE ALSO
AUTHOR

NAME

pidof − find the process ID of a running program

SYNOPSIS

pidof [−s] [−c] [−q] [−w] [−x] [−o omitpid[,omitpid…]…] [−t] [−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.


	−t		Shows all thread ids instead of pids.

-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