PID to find a process ?

[Sammy_2]

Hi All,
How would I find a process name if I know the PID ? Also, How can I find if a PID has any children or (if it is a child) if which process is the parent.

Thanks Unix Admins

[Jeff Schussele · Accepted solution]

Hi Ribus,

Do the following
#ps -ef | grep xxxx
where xxxx is the PID. Should list that process as well as any process it's the parent of.

HTH,
Jeff

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Since all processes (except init) have a parent they are by definition child processes.

To find the data you are looking for, do this:
ps -p PID -l.

Man ps for more options and details.

[Sandip Ghosh]

do ps -ef|grep
then do ps -fu

Sandip

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

# ps -ef|awk '$2==X||$3==X {print $0}' X=

...will give you process name of the , and whether this pid is a parent ($2) or a child ($3).

Regards!

...JRF...

[Bill Hassell]

REALLY IMPORTANT: ps and grep will make *lots* of mistakes. Unix 101 classes seem to always tell new students to use:

ps -ef | grep something

but there are BIG problems with this. Suppose you want to find a process with a PID=123 and you use:

ps -ef | grep 123

and you'll get the process, plus any child processes where 123 is the parent, and also PID numbers like: 1234 11234 and you'll also get processes that happen to have 123 in their command line line (like grep 123)

So avoid like the plague the temptation to use grep. Instead, ask ps to get you the exact process name given a PID:

ps -fp PID

Never fails (unless the process is gone).

You need to search by process name? How about finding all sh processes? grep will fail misearably:

ps -ef | grep sh

Let's ask ps to search for exact process name matches:

UNIX95= ps -f -C sh

Notice: no ksh or csh or any other strings.