The pidof utility was originally written by Werner Almesberger as a part of linux psmisc package (it's avaible via sysutils/psmisc port). I don't enjoy installing some outdated stuff like old linux killall(1) or ps(1) tools, that's why I wrote new pidof. It is written to work under FreeBSD (probably, other BSDs would be ok, not sure about their makefile layout) and use kvm(3) to access data.

• The original pidof sorts on decrease the list of pids if more than one item was given. This implementation doesn't do so.
• This implementation of pidof doesn't support "-e" and "-V" args supported by original pidof and I'm not quite sure it is really needed.

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/pidof; make install clean

pidof.tar.gz (2 KB)

The pgrep(1) utility appaired in FreebSD 5.3 provides the same features and is much more powerful than pidof, so you might consider using it instead.

June 26, 2005, Roman Bogorodskiy