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Process Identification (pid_t) data type in C language

C programming in Linux pid_t data type: In this tutorial, we are going to learn about pid_t data type which can be used in C programming language in Linux.
Submitted by IncludeHelp, on May 30, 2018

pid_t data type in C

pid_t data type stands for process identification and it is used to represent process ids. Whenever, we want to declare a variable that is going to be deal with the process ids we can use pid_t data type.

The type of pid_t data is a signed integer type (signed int or we can say int).

Header file:

The header file which is required to include in the program to use pid_t is sys/types.h

There are basically two functions, which returns the process ids and if we check their return type, it is pid_t, the functions are...

1. getpid() – this function returns the process id of the calling process, its syntax is, pid_t getpid()
2. getppid() – this function returns the parent process id in which the function is calling, its syntax is, pid_t getppid()

Example: program to get process id and parent process id and the data type will be pid_t

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main(void)
{
	pid_t process_id;
	pid_t p_process_id;

	process_id = getpid();
	p_process_id = getppid();

	printf("The process id: %d\n",process_id);
	printf("The process id of parent function: %d\n",p_process_id);

	return 0;
}

Output

    The process id: 3614
    The process id of parent function: 3613

Testing the 'pid_t' data type

Here, we will test the pid_t data type by its size and by assigning values in it

Test cases:

1. If size of pid_t and signed int or int is same.
2. Since unsigned int and signed int have the same size, so we will test the pid_t data type by assigning negative value (as it is a signed int data type and it can be able to store and retrieve it).

Example to implement test cases:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

int main(void)
{
	pid_t var;

	var = -200;

	printf("size of int: %d\n",sizeof(int));
	printf("size if pid_t: %d\n",sizeof(pid_t));
	printf("value of var: %d\n",var);

	return 0;
}

Output

    size of int: 4
    size if pid_t: 4
    value of var: -200

Explanation:

Size of int and size of pid_t are same and the assigned value is -200, which is assigned and printed correct. Thus, we can say pid_t is a signed int data type. We can also check its definitions in the header file.

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