About Linux FAQ

Browse More FAQs:

Linux / UNIX: Find out or determine if process pid is running

Posted by Vivek Gite [Last updated: August 21, 2007]

Q. How do I find out my process is running? How do I get pid number for particular process?

A. The easiest way to find out is run ps aux command and grep process name. If you got output along with process name/pid, your process is running.

Task: Find out process pid

Simply use ps command as follows:
ps aux | grep {process-name}
For example find out if mysqld process (mysqld pid) is running or not:
$ ps aux | grep mysqld
Output:

mysql    28290  1.1  2.7 340496 56812 ?        Sl   Jul31 348:27 /usr/libexec/mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-locking --socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

Find the process ID of a running program using pidof

pidof command finds the process id’s (pids) of the named programs. It prints those id’s on screen. 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.
# pidof mysqld
Output:

28290

Subscribe to our free e-mail newsletter or RSS feed to get all updates. You can Email this page to a friend.

Related Other Helpful FAQs:

Discussion on This FAQ

  1. surendra kumar Says:

    hay man you can use pgrep also know?
    why ps -aux | grep process name?
    u can use pgrep like this
    pgrep process name
    pgrep httpd
    pgrep named
    pgrep firefox
    etc
    if any special about your command just give me info related to it

Leave a Reply

We encourage your comments, and suggestions. But please stay on topic, be polite, and avoid spam. Thank you very much for stopping by our site!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Copyright © 2006-2008 nixCraft. All rights reserved - TOS/Disclaimer - Privacy policy - Sitemap - Powered by Open source software.