How to get process ID of background process?

Question

I start a background process from my shell script, and I would like to kill this process when my script finishes.

How to get the PID of this process from my shell script? As far as I can see variable $! contains the PID of the current script, not the background process.

Answer 1

Some years late, here's a one-liner to find the PID of a command :

read -p "What is the name if the command to find PID of ? " pname ; jobs -l | grep $pname | awk '{ print "The command PID is "$2}

What it does : Ask for the process name variable pname list all jobs and search for $pname with grep use awk to return the result legibly.

Easily amended to stop a process for example, by modifying the awk step and passing to bash

read -p "What is the name if the command to find PID of ? " pname ; jobs -l | grep $pname | awk '{ print "kill "$2} | bash

or non interactively for any process/command "foo" it's very succinct :

set pname=foo ; jobs -l | grep $pname | awk '{ print "The command PID is "$2}

though note this assumes there is just one process named foo. In the unlikely event one were in that situation, one could add a test for number of answers, and if number greater than one, propose a list of process IDs

Answer 2

If you're not able to get the PID directly after starting the job, you could also try this and get the PID later:

foo &

# do some stuff and then

pid=$(ps -aux | grep foo | grep -v grep | tr -s ' ' | cut -d\  -f2)
kill $pid

Explanation:

• ps get information for all processes incl. command
• grep is filtering for your command and the second grep is for not retrieving the pid of grep itself
• tr is removing duplicate spaces for cut
• cut is getting you the column with the PID (2 in this case)

Answer 3

I have run into this problem many times provisioning various infrastructure objects. Many times you need a temp proxy using kubectl or a temp port forward. I have found the timeout command to be a good solution for these, since it allows my script to be self contained and I can be assured that the process will end. I try to set small timeouts and rerun the script if I need still need it.

Answer 4

You can use the jobs -l command to get to a particular jobL

^Z
[1]+  Stopped                 guard

my_mac:workspace r$ jobs -l
[1]+ 46841 Suspended: 18           guard

In this case, 46841 is the PID.

From help jobs:

-l Report the process group ID and working directory of the jobs.

jobs -p is another option which shows just the PIDs.

Answer 5

You might also be able to use pstree:

pstree -p user

This typically gives a text representation of all the processes for the "user" and the -p option gives the process-id. It does not depend, as far as I understand, on having the processes be owned by the current shell. It also shows forks.

Answer 6

An even simpler way to kill all child process of a bash script:

pkill -P $$

The -P flag works the same way with pkill and pgrep - it gets child processes, only with pkill the child processes get killed and with pgrep child PIDs are printed to stdout.

Answer 7

• $$ is the current script's pid
• $! is the pid of the last background process

Here's a sample transcript from a bash session (%1 refers to the ordinal number of background process as seen from jobs):

$ echo $$
3748

$ sleep 100 &
[1] 192

$ echo $!
192

$ kill %1

[1]+  Terminated              sleep 100

Answer 8

pgrep can get you all of the child PIDs of a parent process. As mentioned earlier $$ is the current scripts PID. So, if you want a script that cleans up after itself, this should do the trick:

trap 'kill $( pgrep -P $$ | tr "\n" " " )' SIGINT SIGTERM EXIT

Answer 9

this is what I have done. Check it out, hope it can help.

#!/bin/bash
#
# So something to show.
echo "UNO" >  UNO.txt
echo "DOS" >  DOS.txt
#
# Initialize Pid List
dPidLst=""
#
# Generate background processes
tail -f UNO.txt&
dPidLst="$dPidLst $!"
tail -f DOS.txt&
dPidLst="$dPidLst $!"
#
# Report process IDs
echo PID=$$
echo dPidLst=$dPidLst
#
# Show process on current shell
ps -f
#
# Start killing background processes from list
for dPid in $dPidLst
do
        echo killing $dPid. Process is still there.
        ps | grep $dPid
        kill $dPid
        ps | grep $dPid
        echo Just ran "'"ps"'" command, $dPid must not show again.
done

Then just run it as: ./bgkill.sh with proper permissions of course

root@umsstd22 [P]:~# ./bgkill.sh
PID=23757
dPidLst= 23758 23759
UNO
DOS
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root      3937  3935  0 11:07 pts/5    00:00:00 -bash
root     23757  3937  0 11:55 pts/5    00:00:00 /bin/bash ./bgkill.sh
root     23758 23757  0 11:55 pts/5    00:00:00 tail -f UNO.txt
root     23759 23757  0 11:55 pts/5    00:00:00 tail -f DOS.txt
root     23760 23757  0 11:55 pts/5    00:00:00 ps -f
killing 23758. Process is still there.
23758 pts/5    00:00:00 tail
./bgkill.sh: line 24: 23758 Terminated              tail -f UNO.txt
Just ran 'ps' command, 23758 must not show again.
killing 23759. Process is still there.
23759 pts/5    00:00:00 tail
./bgkill.sh: line 24: 23759 Terminated              tail -f DOS.txt
Just ran 'ps' command, 23759 must not show again.
root@umsstd22 [P]:~# ps -f
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root      3937  3935  0 11:07 pts/5    00:00:00 -bash
root     24200  3937  0 11:56 pts/5    00:00:00 ps -f

Answer 10

You need to save the PID of the background process at the time you start it:

foo &
FOO_PID=$!
# do other stuff
kill $FOO_PID

You cannot use job control, since that is an interactive feature and tied to a controlling terminal. A script will not necessarily have a terminal attached at all so job control will not necessarily be available.