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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ERRORS | VERSIONS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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getpid(2) System Calls Manual getpid(2)
getpid, getppid - get process identification
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <unistd.h>
pid_t getpid(void);
pid_t getppid(void);
getpid() returns the process ID (PID) of the calling process.
(This is often used by routines that generate unique temporary
filenames.)
getppid() returns the process ID of the parent of the calling
process. This will be either the ID of the process that created
this process using fork(), or, if that process has already
terminated, the ID of the process to which this process has been
reparented (either init(1) or a "subreaper" process defined via
the prctl(2) PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER operation).
These functions are always successful.
On Alpha, instead of a pair of getpid() and getppid() system
calls, a single getxpid() system call is provided, which returns a
pair of PID and parent PID. The glibc getpid() and getppid()
wrapper functions transparently deal with this. See syscall(2)
for details regarding register mapping.
POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, 4.3BSD, SVr4.
C library/kernel differences
From glibc 2.3.4 up to and including glibc 2.24, the glibc wrapper
function for getpid() cached PIDs, with the goal of avoiding
additional system calls when a process calls getpid() repeatedly.
Normally this caching was invisible, but its correct operation
relied on support in the wrapper functions for fork(2), vfork(2),
and clone(2): if an application bypassed the glibc wrappers for
these system calls by using syscall(2), then a call to getpid() in
the child would return the wrong value (to be precise: it would
return the PID of the parent process). In addition, there were
cases where getpid() could return the wrong value even when
invoking clone(2) via the glibc wrapper function. (For a
discussion of one such case, see BUGS in clone(2).) Furthermore,
the complexity of the caching code had been the source of a few
bugs within glibc over the years.
Because of the aforementioned problems, since glibc 2.25, the PID
cache is removed: calls to getpid() always invoke the actual
system call, rather than returning a cached value.
If the caller's parent is in a different PID namespace (see
pid_namespaces(7)), getppid() returns 0.
From a kernel perspective, the PID (which is shared by all of the
threads in a multithreaded process) is sometimes also known as the
thread group ID (TGID). This contrasts with the kernel thread ID
(TID), which is unique for each thread. For further details, see
gettid(2) and the discussion of the CLONE_THREAD flag in clone(2).
clone(2), fork(2), gettid(2), kill(2), exec(3), mkstemp(3),
tempnam(3), tmpfile(3), tmpnam(3), credentials(7),
pid_namespaces(7)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
the project can be found at
⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.10.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-02-02. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.10 2024-07-23 getpid(2)
Pages that refer to this page: strace(1), capget(2), clone(2), fcntl(2), gettid(2), PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER(2const), sched_setaffinity(2), sched_setscheduler(2), syscalls(2), id_t(3type), libcap(3), pmnotifyerr(3), pmwebtimerregister(3), raise(3), lloadd.conf(5), slapd.conf(5), slapd-config(5), credentials(7), fanotify(7), pid_namespaces(7), pthreads(7), signal-safety(7), lloadd(8), slapd(8)
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HTML rendering created 2025-02-02 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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