Talk:Process identifier

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

More information wanted[edit]

(The original poster left no headline. I made up one. --Netizen 20:15, 16 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To all people to whom it may concern in this purpose:

I am an information researcher at the present time, and don't know whether I am in a position for this request for addition to the article. I did find the Encylopedia very helpful all the times.

Having seaching to know about the Process Indentifier for my general knowledge and otherwise a computer user, I find the information good enough, but am wondering if someone could add the additional information as regard to Numbers associated or identied for different processes generated by different systems or Softwares e.g. Windows XP of the Microsoft.

Thank you very much, and am be looking forward with time, if such addition could be made for the viewers and to my end.

Have a great a fascinating days to all, specially who are in the concern.

Sincerely,

Saeed U. Din

I'm afraid I don't understand your request. Could you be more specific? Thanks, Netizen 20:17, 16 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think they're asking for information on process idenifiers on different platforms, such as Windows XP. 203.97.255.148 (talk) 01:44, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

So how do we query process information based on pid without procfs? 203.97.255.148 (talk) 01:44, 2 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Purpose?[edit]

I'd like to see some more concrete information on the purpose of the PID: What an OS uses it for, what programmers use it for etc. I know it only seems natural to keep track of processes, but what is the argument? --MGarde (talk) 15:15, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the clue is in the name: it is used for identifying processes. Personally I don't see a huge problem with that in the article - the opening paragraph states this and the (brief) discussion of function calls that use it places it into context. Ultimately it is not a complex topic and I think you would be doing the reader a disservice adding to much detail. Indeed, I am struggling to imagine what more you could say about it - we say is is for identifying processes and go on to show how it is used to manipulate processes via system calls. Happy to discuss this though, do you have any concrete proposals as to what should be in this article? CrispMuncher (talk) 20:17, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point. The article is not supposed to be a text-book reference for programmers, but should address the general public. I guess this was my point too. If someone that has little knowledge of processing in general read this article, i doubt that he would be much enlightened. Before your edit anyway. Good job on that. That was pretty much what i was looking for. --MGarde (talk) 20:37, 2 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Allocation in Windows?[edit]

Does anybody know the way in which a PID is chosen for a new process in Windows? I just ran two instances of Notepad and got PIDs of 4372 and 4880, then when I ran a third it got a PID of 3516. This seems to be a little random. I take it there's some algorithm that chooses them, and it's not just random. 86.3.111.41 (talk) 13:12, 28 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, I suspect it *is* random. I remember back in the late 80s, when Multilevel security was thought to be all the rage, OSes were scrambling to bring in MLS features. The first I recall to do this was IBM's secure Xenix. One of these features was process id allocation (as the AIX link mentions), which was intended to combat the rather questionable information leak of covert channels. I suspect that they figured it was easy to do, and if they could bypass those CC questions, they should. Fool4jesus (talk) 18:29, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]