They are assigned linearly, however once a pid is used, it is never reused until the machine reboots.
A pid of 413 means that when that process was fork()'ed there had been 412 other processes already created. But remember every time you type ls, you've run a process. 413 isn't a large pid at all. My linux box which I very rarely reboot is at PIDs that start at 20000 I'm surprised that any program you start after the boot process is as low as 412. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Silambu Chelvan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2003 10:23 AM Subject: About PID...???!!! > Hi All, > > I have been using linux for quite some time. I wonder > how the PID is assigned by the kernel. Is there > anything like range of PID for each user? In my > machine I could see PIDs of 256, 389, 413 etc. Does > this mean that there are almost 413 processes running? > > Please explain..... > > with regards, > M. SilambuChelvan > > __________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software > http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com > - > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in > the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
