How to find a program’s process id (pid)

Here’s an easy way to get the pid of a running process.

Running the “pidof” command will return the pid(s) for a running program. See sample below,

danny@pandora:~> pidof syslog-ng
2043
danny@pandora:~> pidof acpid
2045
danny@pandora:~> pidof /usr/bin/firefox
14408
danny@pandora:~> pidof /usr/bin/compiz
27164
danny@pandora:~> pidof /bin/bash
27011 17339 16792 16477 15151 14403

Simple right!?

3 Responses to “How to find a program’s process id (pid)”

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1. zaheer arif says:

   August 14, 2009 at 8:56 pm

   Dear,
   I have a question.Suppose we have two pogramms.The control of child program is in the parent one.I just one to kill the process of child program after a few min or seconds while the Parent programm is running in Linux.Help in this regard would be really appreciated.

   Reply
2. Danesh says:

   August 16, 2009 at 9:34 pm

   do a ps -ef | grep “the process name”

   then kill that PID

   Reply
3. zaheer arif says:

   August 17, 2009 at 7:29 am

   Dear,
   In connection with the above problem ,I don’t know the process name of the child program.Thanks in advance.

   Reply