How to check if a process id (PID) exists

Question

The best way is:

if ps -p $PID > /dev/null
then
   echo "$PID is running"
   # Do something knowing the pid exists, i.e. the process with $PID is running
fi

The problem with kill -0 $PID is that the exit code will be non-zero even if the process is running and you don't have permission to kill it. For example:

kill -0 $known_running_pid

and

kill -0 $non_running_pid

have a non-zero exit codes that are indistinguishable for a normal user, but one of them is by assumption running, while the other is not.

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Partly related, additional info provided by AnrDaemon: The init process (PID 1) is certainly running on all Linux machines, but not all POSIX systems are Linux. PID 1 is not guaranteed to exist there:

kill -0 1 
-bash: kill: (1) - No such process … 

DISCUSSION

The answers discussing kill and race conditions are exactly right if the body of the test is a "kill". I came looking for the general "how do you test for a PID existence in bash".

The /proc method is interesting, but in some sense breaks the spirit of the ps command abstraction, i.e. you don't need to go looking in /proc because what if Linus decides to call the exe file something else?

To check for the existence of a process, use

kill -0 $pid

But just as @unwind said, if you want it to terminate in any case, then just

kill $pid

Otherwise you will have a race condition, where the process might have disappeared after the first kill -0.

If you want to ignore the text output of kill and do something based on the exit code, you can

if ! kill $pid > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "Could not send SIGTERM to process $pid" >&2
fi

If your system implements procfs interface, you can just check if there is a special file /proc/$PID/status:

if [ -e /proc/$PID/status ]; then
    echo "process exists"
fi

otherwise you can use ps program:

if [ -n "$(ps -p $PID -o pid=)" ]

In the latter form, -o pid= is an output format to display only the process ID column with no header. The quotes are necessary for non-empty string operator -n to give valid result.

ps command with -p $PID can do this:

$ ps -p 3531
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
 3531 ?        00:03:07 emacs

You have two ways:

Lets start by looking for a specific application in my laptop:

[root@pinky:~]# ps fax | grep mozilla
 3358 ?        S      0:00  \_ /bin/sh /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/firefox
16198 pts/2    S+     0:00  \_ grep mozilla

All examples now will look for PID 3358.

First way: Run ps aux and grep for the PID in the second column. In this example I look for firefox, and then for it's PID:

[root@pinky:~]# ps aux | awk '{print $2 }' | grep 3358
3358

So your code will be:

if [ ps aux | awk '{print $2 }' | grep -q $PID 2> /dev/null ]; then
    kill $PID 
fi

Second way: Just look for something in the /proc/$PID directory. I am using exe in this example, but you can use anything else.

[root@pinky:~]# ls -l /proc/3358/exe 
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 elcuco elcuco 0 2010-06-15 12:33 /proc/3358/exe -> /bin/bash

So your code will be:

if [ -f /proc/$PID/exe ]; then
    kill $PID 
fi

BTW: whats wrong with kill -9 $PID || true ?

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EDIT:

After thinking about it for a few months.. (about 24...) the original idea I gave here is a nice hack, but highly unportable. While it teaches a few implementation details of Linux, it will fail to work on Mac, Solaris or *BSD. It may even fail on future Linux kernels. Please - use "ps" as described in other responses.

It seems like you want

wait $PID

which will return when $pid finishes.

Otherwise you can use

ps -p $PID

to check if the process is still alive (this is more effective than kill -0 $pid because it will work even if you don't own the pid).