CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
THESorcerer
THESorcerer

Reputation: 1065

Is there any way to find the pids of children of a program?

Is there any way to find the pid of children of a program ?

For example I'm starting pppoe connection using system program:

pon dsl-provider

The program will exit after establishing connection and will spawn a pppd needed for connection:

ps wx | grep pppd
  882 ?        S      0:01 /usr/sbin/pppd call dsl-provider

The thing is (I was doing that until now) that I don't want to grep in ps listing, I want an exact answer, and I need this in many circumstances (the above is only an example). How can I do that?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 227

Answers (3)

holygeek
holygeek

Reputation: 16185

Try pstree with the -p option to show the process tree of a process and its children with pids appended:

$ pstree -p `pgrep pppd`

Upvotes: 1

Zsolt Botykai
Zsolt Botykai

Reputation: 51583

I'd use ps --ppid ORIGINAL_PROGRAMS_PID although it might not work if the original program exited.

Upvotes: 0

user219882
user219882

Reputation: 15834

You can try this

# somehow get the PID of the parent (882 in your case)
PID=`ps wx | grep pppd | awk '{ print $1; }'`

# formatted output (includes the parent)
ps ax --format pid,ppid,command | grep $PID | grep -v grep

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions