| HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 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. |  |
| NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | ERRORS | VERSIONS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | |
| |
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-6.15.tar.gz fetched from ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on 2025-08-11. 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 6.15 2025-05-17 getpid(2) Pages that refer to this page: strace(1), capget(2), clone(2), F_GETSIG(2const), 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)
| HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 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. | |