On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 02:54:14PM +0100, Helmut Schneider wrote:

quoted text
> pierre  wrote:

>> On Tue, 29 Jan 2008 11:37:41 +0100

>> "Helmut Schneider"  wrote:

>>

>>> Claudio Jeker  wrote:

>>>> We don't believe in pid files. Use pgrep(1) and pkill(1) instead,

>>>> you will never have stale info that way.

>>>

>>> pgrep on OpenBSD does not support '-o' (Select only the oldest). It

>>> is - well - it could be more useful.

>>>

>> man pgrep

>> -n      Match only the most recently created process, if any.

>>

>> Is that what you're looking for ?

>

> Not at all. I might find a child but I will never find the parent.

>

> [root@BSDHelmut ~]# pgrep -fl httpd

> 81972 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 81960 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 1115 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 1114 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 1111 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 1109 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 1108 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> 979 /usr/local/sbin/httpd

> [root@BSDHelmut ~]#

>

> To stop httpd, which pid should I kill, the oldest, or the most recent?

>

> OK, 'pgrep -fl httpd | tail -1' does the trick, and pgrep is not safe

> enough for finding parents, but...

If you really want to find the parent you can...
$ ps ax -O pgid | grep ntpd

 4887  4887 ??  Is      0:00.01 ntpd: [priv] (ntpd)

 7164  4887 ??  I       0:00.06 ntpd: ntp engine (ntpd)
The header that gets stripped by grep:

  PID  PGID TT  STAT       TIME COMMAND
So you can see that for one process PID==PGID. Bingo.
--

Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG

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