Getting a window's PID by clicking on it

Question

Is there any package which shows PID of a window by clicking on it?

Caleb · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-22T10:13:27.227

88

Yes. Try xprop and you are looking for the value of _NET_WM_PID:

xprop _NET_WM_PID | cut -d' ' -f3
{click on window}

edited Aug 22 '11 at 10:13

answered Aug 22 '11 at 10:08

Caleb

15

Note that this information is provided voluntarily by the client and need not be correct, present or meaningful (remote clients, clients in a separate PID namespace). – Simon Richter Aug 22 '11 at 13:23

score 24 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 22 '11 at 10:06

24

xprop will return a window's PID.

You can filter the verbose output using awk:

xprop | awk '/PID/ {print $3}'

answered Aug 22 '11 at 10:06

jasonwryan

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 09 '18 at 14:37

To complete those excellent answers, here is a little bash command to get the command (that I actually needed):

id=`xprop _NET_WM_PID | awk '/PID/ {print $3}'`; cat /proc/$id/comm

Example:

Lila ~ # id=`xprop _NET_WM_PID | awk '/PID/ {print $3}'`; cat /proc/$id/comm

gnome-terminal-

3 Answers3