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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T07:55:00+00:00

Experts, How do I see the source code for the Linux shell command pidof

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Experts,

How do I see the source code for the Linux shell command pidof ? Based on the answers for related questions I checked in the GNU coreutils. It isn’t there..

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  1. Editorial Team

    If you are on Debian system like Ubuntu you can try something on these lines:
    dpkg -S <utility>, this will tell you which package installed this utility; then you can get the source using apt-get source <package-name>. To get the source make sure you have deb-src entry in /etc/apt/sources.list
    For example on Ubuntu system I use: 

    $ dpkg -S pidof
sysvinit-utils: /bin/pidof
sysvinit-utils: /usr/share/man/man8/pidof.8.gz

    So the package name is sysvinit-utils

    $ apt-get source sysvinit-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Picking 'sysvinit' as source package instead of 'sysvinit-utils'
NOTICE: 'sysvinit' packaging is maintained in the 'Svn' version control system at:
svn://svn.debian.org/pkg-sysvinit/sysvinit/trunk
...
dpkg-source: info: extracting sysvinit in sysvinit-2.87dsf
dpkg-source: info: unpacking sysvinit_2.87dsf-4ubuntu17.4.tar.gz

    Source package picked. It also inform about svn where the source is maintained.

    $ ls sysvinit*
sysvinit_2.87dsf-4ubuntu17.4.dsc  sysvinit_2.87dsf-4ubuntu17.4.tar.gz

sysvinit-2.87dsf:
contrib/  COPYRIGHT  debian/  doc/  man/  obsolete/  README  src/

    I am sure there should be equivalent of this on non-Debian systems. Google might help you.
    Hope this can help a bit!

    Edit: A little info for yum:
    1. Search for package: yum whatprovides <package_name>
    So for pidof maybe:

    yum whatprovides `which pidof`

    2. Get the source: yumdownloader --source <source_name>. You may need yum-utils for this. More info at this link
    Although I have not tried it, but I guess you can give a shot!

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