I have found this useful Linux command called pidof. Lately I have found that Firefox has been crashing with audio in Ubuntu 9.10.

I have had to kill the process before I could restart it. I tried using top to see if Firefox was using processing power still. It wasn’t. I tried looking for it. Couldn’t find the process.

So just about an hour ago Firefox did the same thing again. I searched the commands that would tell my the process id of an application. I found pidof.

To use this command you will need the name of the application.

syntax: pidof (application)
-s single shot: returns only 1 pid
-c root: returns root pid for the applications but you will need to be root to do so.
-x scripts: used to find the scripts that go along with the application
-o omit: omits processes with that process id

Ryan Orser.