I need a way to get the Process ID of the last command I executed in a script. Not the last background process but the last command.

For example, suppose I am executing a binary inside a script like so.

binary.program argument1 argument2

If this binary program runs fast, is there a command that will tell me the last PID of that command. In other words, can I get the PID of a command I execute within a shellscript? Is my only alternative to get information like this by running the process in the background and using "$!"?

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

You could do that with system call tracer,

in Linux available as strace

on Solaris as truss commands

take this sample,

>cat script.zsh
#! /bin/zsh
  ./while
exit 0

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
  while(1) {
  }
  return 0;
}

clone(parameters) = return value;

I like your alternative, however I unfortunately need to make this work on HP-UX out of the box. So I do not have trace or tusc available on this server so I cannot use this method. Thanks for the reply, I will keep digging and see if I can find another solution. Thanks again.

Am surprised,

why is that there isnt tusc (system call tracer for HP-UX) available ?

Well, tusc is not default, it is something that has to be installed extra. I am not a sysadmin on this box so I cannot make the call of adding it. Since what I was trying to do would go elsewhere, I have to also assume the HP-UX box sitting elsewhere would also not have tusc installed.