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Full Discussion: Get all child processes of a process
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Get all child processes of a process Post 302974661 by Don Cragun on Thursday 2nd of June 2016 03:24:07 AM
Old 06-02-2016
Check the man page for the ps utility -o option. The names used for various fields in the output may vary from system to system, but there should be heading like pid, ppid, and command OR PID, PPID, and CMD. Using those options, you can use something like (using a BSD-based ps as an example):
Code:
ps -A -o 'ppid pid command'

to get a list of all processes on your system showing its parent process ID, its process ID, and its command name and arguments. And to find all of the children of a given process ID, you could use:
Code:
ps -A -o 'pid pid command' | grep '^ *pid '

where pid is the process ID of the process whose children you want to find.

If you want to find all of a process' un-orphaned descendants you could use an awk script instead of grep to create a tree of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, ... for all processes with a given process ID as a parent recursively. (Unfortunately, any process that has been orphaned, will have PPID 1 with no way to tie it back to its birth-parents.)
This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
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LEARN ABOUT V7

wait

WAIT(2) 							System Calls Manual							   WAIT(2)

NAME

       wait - wait for process to terminate

SYNOPSIS

       wait(status)
       int *status;

       wait(0)

DESCRIPTION

       Wait  causes its caller to delay until a signal is received or one of its child processes terminates.  If any child has died since the last
       wait, return is immediate; if there are no children, return is immediate with the error bit set (resp. with a value of -1  returned).   The
       normal return yields the process ID of the terminated child.  In the case of several children several wait calls are needed to learn of all
       the deaths.

       If (int)status is nonzero, the high byte of the word pointed to receives the low byte of the argument of exit when  the	child  terminated.
       The  low  byte  receives the termination status of the process.	See signal(2) for a list of termination statuses (signals); 0 status indi-
       cates normal termination.  A special status (0177) is returned for a stopped process which has not terminated and can  be  restarted.   See
       ptrace(2).  If the 0200 bit of the termination status is set, a core image of the process was produced by the system.

       If the parent process terminates without waiting on its children, the initialization process (process ID = 1) inherits the children.

SEE ALSO

       exit(2), fork(2), signal(2)

DIAGNOSTICS

       Returns -1 if there are no children not previously waited for.

ASSEMBLER

       (wait = 7.)
       sys wait
       (process ID in r0)
       (status in r1)

       The high byte of the status is the low byte of r0 in the child at termination.

																	   WAIT(2)
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