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Member "sysvinit-2.88/man/pidof.8" of archive sysvinit-2.88.tar.gz:
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pidof -- find the process ID of a running program.
pidof
[-s] [-c] [-n] [-x] [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]] [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]..] program [program..]
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.
- -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.
- -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
the variable PIDOF_NETFS may be set and exported.
- -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.
- At least one
program was found with the requested name.
- No program was found with the
requested name.
pidof is actually the same program as killall5; 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 that the executable name
of running processes is calculated with readlink(2), so symbolic links
to executables will also match.
shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8),
reboot(8), killall5(8)
Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl
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