Man1 - pidof.1

pidof – find the process ID of a running program

pidof [*-s*] [*-c*] [*-q*] [*-w*] [*-x*] [*-o* /omitpid[,omitpid…]…/] [*-S* /separator/] program [*program…*]

Pidof finds the process id’s (pids) of the named programs. It prints those id’s on the standard output.

-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.

-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.

0

At least one program was found with the requested name.

1

No program was found with the requested name.

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.

*pgrep*(1), *pkill*(1)

Jaromir Capik <jcapik@redhat.com>