Note: you can forego the ps and simply read /proc/$PID/cmdline, which is a \0-de...

Someone · on March 28, 2015

If you are willing to use /proc, you basically have Linux, and can assume just as well that your shell is bash.

If so, $$ is the easiest way to get the PID of the current shell. That works in several other shells, too, but I am not sure sh is guaranteed to have it (FreeBSD's sh has it. See http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sh)

protomyth · on March 28, 2015

Does that work on anything other than Linux?

myhf · on March 28, 2015

Not in exactly the same way, but every unixy system has some way of finding the parent pid and looking up its command line.

protomyth · on March 29, 2015

Is Quanticles's code portable to the other unix systems?

myhf · on March 30, 2015

It should work on most systems that have a /proc filesystem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs

If you don't have /proc but do have ps (1), you could get the parent pid like this:

    PID := $(ps -p $$$$ -o ppid=)