Question

What is the difference between PID and TID?

The standard answer would be that PID is for processes while TID is for threads. However, I have seen that some commands use them interchangeably. For example, htop has a column for PIDs, in which PIDs for threads of the same process are shown (with different values). So when does a PID represent a thread or a process?

Answer 1

It is complicated: pid is process identifier; tid is thread identifier.

But as it happens, the kernel doesn’t make a real distinction between them: threads are just like processes but they share some things (memory, fds…) with other instances of the same group.

So, a tid is actually the identifier of the schedulable object in the kernel (thread), while the pid is the identifier of the group of schedulable objects that share memory and fds (process).

But to make things more interesting, when a process has only one thread (the initial situation and in the good old times the only one) the pid and the tid are always the same. So any function that works with a tid will automatically work with a pid.

It is worth noting that many functions/system calls/command line utilities documented to work with pid actually use tids. But if the effect is process-wide you will simply not notice the difference.