pidof(1) — Linux manual page

PIDOF(1)                 General Commands Manual                 PIDOF(1)

NAME         top

       pidof - find the process ID of a running program

SYNOPSIS         top

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

DESCRIPTION         top

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

OPTIONS         top

       -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         top

       0      At least one program was found with the requested name.

       1      No program was found with the requested name.

BUGS         top

       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         top

       pgrep(1), pkill(1)

AUTHOR         top

       Jaromir Capik ⟨[email protected]⟩

COLOPHON         top

       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 2025-08-11.  (At that
       time, the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2025-07-30.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
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       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

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

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

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