redhat man page for pidof

PIDOF(8)						Linux System Administrator's Manual						  PIDOF(8)

NAME
       pidof -- find the process ID of a running program.

SYNOPSIS
       pidof [-s] [-x] [-o omitpid] [-o omitpid..]  program [program..]

DESCRIPTION
       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.

OPTIONS
       -s     Single shot - this instructs the program to only return one pid.

       -x     Scripts too - this causes the program to also return process id's of shells running the named scripts.

       -o     Tells  pidof  to omit processes with that process id. The special pid %PPID can be used to name the parent process of the pidof pro-
	      gram, in other words the calling shell or shell script.

NOTES
       pidof is simply a (symbolic) link to the killall5 program, which should also be located in /sbin.

       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.

SEE ALSO
       shutdown(8), init(8), halt(8), reboot(8)

AUTHOR
       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl

								    01 Sep 1998 							  PIDOF(8)