How to get parent PID of a given process in GNU/Linux from command line?

Resolved before asked: cat /proc/1111/status | grep PPid

Solution 1:

Command line:

ps -o ppid= -p 1111

Function:

ppid () { ps -p ${1:-$$} -o ppid=; }

Alias (a function is preferable):

alias ppid='ps -o ppid= -p'

Script:

#!/bin/sh
pid=$1
if [ -z $pid ]
then
    read -p "PID: " pid
fi
ps -p ${pid:-$$} -o ppid=

If no PID is supplied to the function or the script, they default to show the PPID of the current process.

To use the alias, a PID must be supplied.

To print parent ids (PPID) of all the processes, use this command:

ps j

For the single process, just pass the PID, like: ps j 1234.

To extract only the value, filter output by awk, like:

ps j | awk 'NR>1 {print $3}' # BSD ps
ps j | awk 'NR>1 {print $1}' # GNU ps

To list PIDs of all parents, use pstree (install it if you don't have it):

$ pstree -sg 1234
systemd(1)───sshd(1036)───bash(2383)───pstree(3007)

To get parent PID of the current process, use echo $$.

This is one of those things I learn, forget, relearn, repeat. But it's useful. The pstree command's ‘s’ flag shows a tree with a leaf at N:

pstree -sA $(pgrep badblocks)
systemd---sudo---mkfs.ext4---badblocks

Parent pid is in shell variable PPID, so

echo $PPID

Read /proc/$PID/status. Can be easily scripted:

#!/bin/sh
P=$1
if [ -z "$P" ]; then
    read P
fi
cat /proc/"$P"/status | grep PPid: | grep -o "[0-9]*"