Finding the Process ID (PID) on Linux

Every program running on your system is assigned a number that uniquely identifies it. This is known as the Process ID (commonly referred to as PID). Proctal needs this number to identify the program you want to take control of.
These are a couple of methods for finding the PID of a program on Linux.

• pidof
• pgrep
• ps and grep

pidof

pidof takes the name of the program as its first argument and prints a list of PIDs of all matching programs, separated by spaces.

$ pidof program-name
12345

pgrep

pgrep takes an Extended Regular Expression and prints a list of PIDs of all programs whose name or command line match the expression.

$ pgrep prog*am-n?me
12345 12346

ps and grep

grep matches patterns and ps prints a row for each program running on the system. By piping the output of ps to grep, you can find the row for the program you are interested in.

$ ps ax | grep program-name
12345 pts/0    S+     0:00 program-name argument1 argument2

The first column is the PID and the last column is the command line.