In order to send a signal to a process, its PID must be known. But in the case of Apache, there are many httpd processes running. Which one should be used? The parent process is the one that must be signaled, so it is the parent's PID that must be identified.

The easiest way to find the Apache parent PID is to read the file. To find this file, look in the httpd.conf file. Open httpd.conf and look for the PidFile directive. Here is the line from our httpd.conf file:

PidFile /home/httpd/httpd_perl/logs/

When Apache starts up, it writes its own process ID in in a human-readable format. When the server is stopped, should be deleted, but if Apache is killed abnormally, may still exist even if the process is not running any more.

Of course, the PID of the running Apache can also be found using the ps(1) and grep(1) utilities (as shown previously). Assuming that the binary is called httpd_perl, the command would be:

panic% ps auxc | grep httpd_perl

or, on System V:

panic% ps -ef | grep httpd_perl

This will produce a list of all the httpd_perl (parent and child) processes. If the server was started by the root user account, it will be easy to locate, since it will belong to root. Here is an example of the sort of output produced by one of the ps command lines given above:

root   17309 0.9 2.7 8344 7096 ?  S 18:22 0:00 httpd_perl
nobody 17310 0.1 2.7 8440 7164 ?  S 18:22 0:00 httpd_perl
nobody 17311 0.0 2.7 8440 7164 ?  S 18:22 0:00 httpd_perl
nobody 17312 0.0 2.7 8440 7164 ?  S 18:22 0:00 httpd_perl

In this example, it can be seen that all the child processes are running as user nobody whereas the parent process runs as user root. There is only one root process, and this must be the parent process. Any kill signals should be sent to this parent process.

If the server is started under some other user account (e.g., when the user does not have root access), the processes will belong to that user. The only truly foolproof way to identify the parent process is to look for the process whose parent process ID (PPID) is 1 (use ps to find out the PPID of the process).

If you have the GNU tools installed on your system, there is a nifty utility that makes it even easier to discover the parent process. The tool is called pstree, and it is very simple to use. It lists all the processes showing the family hierarchy, so if we grep the output for the wanted process's family, we can see the parent process right away. Running this utility and greping for httpd_perl, we get:

panic% pstree -p | grep httpd_perl
  |                   |-httpd_perl(17311)
  |                   |-httpd_perl(17312)

And this one is even simpler:

panic% pstree -p | grep 'httpd_perl.*httpd_perl'

In both cases, we can see that the parent process has the PID 17309.

ps's f option, available on many Unix platforms, produces a tree-like report of the processes as well. For example, you can run ps axfwwww to get a tree of all processes.