4

I'm trying to capture the pid of a background process run in bash.

I tried 

somecommand & > somecommand.pid

It outputs the pid to the screen but it's not part of stdout of the command.

[1] 1778
rwilliams
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1 Answers1

7

The special variable $! contains the PID of the most recent job placed in the background:

$ sleep 4 &
$ sleep_pid=$!
$ echo $sleep_pid
4456

This is documented in Special Parameters of man bash

builder-7000
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