1PIDOF(8)              Linux System Administrator's Manual             PIDOF(8)
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NAME

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

9       pidof  [-s]  [-c]  [-x] [-m] [-o omitpid] [-o omitpid..]  program [pro‐
10       gram..]
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DESCRIPTION

13       Pidof finds the process id's (pids) of the named  programs.  It  prints
14       those id's on the standard output. This program is on some systems used
15       in run-level change scripts, especially when the system has a  System-V
16       like   rc  structure.  In  that  case  these  scripts  are  located  in
17       /etc/rc?.d, where ? is the runlevel. If the system  has  a  start-stop-
18       daemon (8) program that should be used instead.
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OPTIONS

21       -s     Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one pid.
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23       -c     Only  return  process  ids  that  are running with the same root
24              directory.  This option is ignored for non-root users,  as  they
25              will  be unable to check the current root directory of processes
26              they do not own.
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28       -x     Scripts too - this causes the program  to  also  return  process
29              id's of shells running the named scripts.
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31       -o omitpid
32              Tells  pidof to omit processes with that process id. The special
33              pid %PPID can be used to name the parent process  of  the  pidof
34              program, in other words the calling shell or shell script.
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36       -m     When  used  with  -o, will also omit any processes that have the
37              same argv[0] and argv[1] as any explicitly omitted process  ids.
38              This  can  be  used to avoid multiple shell scripts concurrently
39              calling pidof returning each other's pids.
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EXIT STATUS

42       0      At least one program was found with the requested name.
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44       1      No program was found with the requested name.
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NOTES

47       pidof is actually the same program as  killall5;  the  program  behaves
48       according to the name under which it is called.
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50       When  pidof  is  invoked  with a full pathname to the program it should
51       find the pid of, it is reasonably safe. Otherwise it is  possible  that
52       it  returns  pids of running programs that happen to have the same name
53       as the program you're after but are actually other programs. Note  that
54       that  the executable name of running processes is calculated with read‐
55       link(2), so symbolic links to executables will also match.
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SEE ALSO

59       shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8), killall5(8)
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AUTHOR

62       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl
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66                                  01 Sep 1998                         PIDOF(8)
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