pidof(1) — Linux manual page

PIDOF(1)                      User Commands                     PIDOF(1)

NAME

       pidof - find the process ID of a running program

SYNOPSIS

       pidof [-s] [-c] [-q] [-w] [-x] [-o omitpid[,...]] ... [-t] [-S
       separator] 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.

SEE ALSO

       pgrep(1), pkill(1)

AUTHOR

       Jaromir Capik ⟨jcapik@redhat.com⟩

COLOPHON

       This page is part of the procps-ng (/proc filesystem utilities)
       project.  Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/blob/master/Documentation/bugs.md⟩.
       This page was obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps.git⟩ on 2024-06-14.  (At
       that time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in
       the repository was 2024-06-04.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
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       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

procps-ng                      2023-01-16                       PIDOF(1)

Pages that refer to this page: killall(1), lsfd(1), unshare(1)

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