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 zombie (Z) status.  Usually these processes are skipped
              as  trying  to  deal  with them can cause pidof or related tools to hang.  Note: In the past pidof
              would ignore processes in the uninterruptable state (D), unless the -z flag was  specified.   This
              is no longer the case.  The pidof program will find and report processes in the D state whether -z
              is specified or not.

       -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(8); 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

sysvinit                                           01 Sep 1998                                          PIDOF(8)