Need to get pid of a process and have to store the pid in a variable

[samudha]

Hi,

I have to get the pid of a process and have to store the pid of the process in a variable and i want to use the value of this variable to kill a process based on some condition. so how can i able to get the pid of a process and store it in a variable? please help me on this. I am new to unix.

[Motoma]

Hi,

I have to get the pid of a process and have to store the pid of the process in a variable and i want to use the value of this variable to kill a process based on some condition. so how can i able to get the pid of a process and store it in a variable? please help me on this. I am new to unix.

Take a look at the man pages for 'ps' and 'awk' and come back if you have questions about their uses.

[Nick Keeman]

Hi,

Suppose your process is called 'abc'. Then you can get the entry with:

ps -ef | grep abc

Very often you will the 'abc' process and also the 'grep' process. Filter out the 'grep' process by:

ps -ef | grep abc | grep -v grep

Now this will give you the 'abc' entry only. The process-id is the second column. Get this with:

ps -ef | grep abc | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'

The if you want to assign this to a variabel do:
pid=`ps -ef | grep abc | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

That's all there's to it.

Let me hear how you're getting on with this.

Nick

[Motoma]

Hey Nick! Thanks for your response!

[gsrivast]

this trick may not work in some scenario.suppose some other process is also running with abc keyword like pqrabc or pqrabcstu that time it may get that pid.

[Nepomuk]

If you start up a process (say, firefox) and want to save the PID, the fastest way would be to use something like this:

firefox &
PID=$!
[ condition ] && kill $PID

Greetings,
Nepomuk