pidof

[giantpanda]

Used for: Finding the process ids of running processes.
pidof man page: http://bit.ly/2ru0vIN

Notes:

• Used in system-V init scripts.
• pidof is a link to killall5

$ ls -l /sbin/pidof 
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 18 May 24 22:03 /sbin/pidof -> /usr/sbin/killall5

First Option	Description
-s	Only return one pid
-c	For root user, return the process id's of processes which have the same root directory
-n	Do not run on NFS, alternatively set PIDOF_NETFS environment variable.
-x	find process id's of scripts.
-o	ignore process id, can use the %PPID to omit the parent process id

Find all process id's of python.

$ pidof python
1429 846

Find all process id's of python and sshd.

$ pidof python sshd
1429 846 1456

Find python process id's, but only return the first one found.

$ pidof -s python
1429

Exclude a process id from the list.

$ pidof -o 1429 python
846

pgrep is favoured over pidof. In the Unix & Linux world, as we know, there are multiple ways to achieve your end goal.

pgrep man page: http://bit.ly/2rLnQW6
killall5 man page: http://bit.ly/2qoosRP