pidof.man

.\" $Id: pidof.man, 1998/05/17 18:34 jfb $
.\"
.\" The author makes no claims as to the fitness or correctness of this software
.\" for any use whatsoever, and it is provided as is. Any use of this software
.\" is at the user's own risk. 
.\"
.TH PIDOF @BIGMANSEC@ 1998/05/17
.SH NAME
pidof \- get process id from program name
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B pidof 
[
.B -cu
]
.IR process_name
[
.IR process_name \|.\|.\|.
]
.SH DESCRIPTION
For each
.I process_name
that corresponds to a running process,
.B pidof
prints the process's process id to the standard output. If a
.I process_name
corresponds to multiple processes, all process ids are listed in a
non\-deterministic order.
.I process_name
should not contain a directory component. If it does, no processes
will be matched.
.SH COMMAND\-LINE OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-c
Print process IDs separated by commas rather than spaces. This is useful
when feeding output to
.BR ps (1)
or other such programs.
.TP
.B \-u
List only those processes owned by the current user.
.LP
.SH RETURN CODES
An exit status of zero indicates that a process name was matched to
a current process id.  An exit status of one indicates that no
processes with the given
.I process_name
were found to be running.
.SH CAVEATS
If any
.I process_name
is PRFNSZ\-1 characters long or longer, there is a possibility of an 
ambiguous match. PRFNSZ is currently defined as 16 in <sys/procfs.h>,
so 15 characters is the point at which a
.I process_name
can become ambiguous.
.SH SEE ALSO
.BR killcmd (@MANSEC@),
.BR ps (1)
.SH AUTHOR
Jeff Blank, jfb@mr-happy.com