Question

I’ve a process name and I’ve to send a kill() signal to that process but I need its PID to call kill(). I would only like to use:

popen('pidof process_name'); 

as the last thing. Is there any other way to find out the process’ PID? One way I could think of is to send a socket request to that process and ask to its PID.

The other way is a little too complicated for a simple code I’m writing: to do what pidof command’s source code is actually doing (it uses a function call find_pid_by_name() but that’s doing a lot of things).

If no simple solution is possible, I’ve to do this:

system('pkill <process_name>'); 

and check its return code. But will pkill be available for sure on all Linux machines?

Answer 1

You mentioned you were using linux. It isn’t the cleanest solution, but you can go through every entry in /proc and check the process name in cmdline against what you are looking for.