Manpages - getpid.2
Table of Contents
NAME
getpid, getppid - get process identification
SYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h> pid_t getpid(void); pid_t getppid(void);
DESCRIPTION
*getpid*() returns the process ID (PID) of the calling process. (This is often used by routines that generate unique temporary filenames.)
getppid*() returns the process ID of the parent of the calling process. This will be either the ID of the process that created this process using *fork*(), or, if that process has already terminated, the ID of the process to which this process has been reparented (either *init*(1) or a “subreaper” process defined via the *prctl*(2) *PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER operation).
ERRORS
These functions are always successful.
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008, 4.3BSD, SVr4.
NOTES
If the caller’s parent is in a different PID namespace (see *pid_namespaces*(7)), *getppid*() returns 0.
From a kernel perspective, the PID (which is shared by all of the threads in a multithreaded process) is sometimes also known as the thread group ID (TGID). This contrasts with the kernel thread ID (TID), which is unique for each thread. For further details, see gettid*(2) and the discussion of the *CLONE_THREAD flag in *clone*(2).
C library/kernel differences
From glibc version 2.3.4 up to and including version 2.24, the glibc wrapper function for *getpid*() cached PIDs, with the goal of avoiding additional system calls when a process calls *getpid*() repeatedly. Normally this caching was invisible, but its correct operation relied on support in the wrapper functions for *fork*(2), *vfork*(2), and *clone*(2): if an application bypassed the glibc wrappers for these system calls by using *syscall*(2), then a call to *getpid*() in the child would return the wrong value (to be precise: it would return the PID of the parent process). In addition, there were cases where *getpid*() could return the wrong value even when invoking *clone*(2) via the glibc wrapper function. (For a discussion of one such case, see BUGS in *clone*(2).) Furthermore, the complexity of the caching code had been the source of a few bugs within glibc over the years.
Because of the aforementioned problems, since glibc version 2.25, the PID cache is removed: calls to *getpid*() always invoke the actual system call, rather than returning a cached value.
On Alpha, instead of a pair of *getpid*() and *getppid*() system calls, a single *getxpid*() system call is provided, which returns a pair of PID and parent PID. The glibc *getpid*() and *getppid*() wrapper functions transparently deal with this. See *syscall*(2) for details regarding register mapping.
SEE ALSO
*clone*(2), *fork*(2), *gettid*(2), *kill*(2), *exec*(3), *mkstemp*(3), *tempnam*(3), *tmpfile*(3), *tmpnam*(3), *credentials*(7), *pid_namespaces*(7)
COLOPHON
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