Parent process ID

[James_Rogers]

There is no standard variable in the environment, but there is a way to
get what you need.

In ksh you can define the following function which will produce the
information you need:

function ppid {
ps -fp $$ | cut -c15-20 |&
read -p ppid
read -p ppid
echo $ppid
}

This function gets the parent process id from the "ps" comand and then
extracts all the surrounding information.

"ps -fp $$" produces the following line:

     UID   PID  PPID  C    STIME TTY      TIME COMMAND
     jim 27859 27818196 08:55:01 ttyp9    0:03 ps -fp 27859

Piping the above data through "cut -c15-20" produces:

 PPID
27818

Ending the pipe command with "|&" causes the output of the command to be
piped back into the current shell.  The first "read -p ppid" then reads
the first line of data from the pipe.  The second "read -p ppid" reads
the second line of data from the pipe.  Now "ppid" contains the value we
want and we echo that value to stdout.


Jim Rogers at Hewlett Packard