How to get the Parent Process ID by giving a Process ID in Linux using C/C++?

Question

I know it's possible to get ppid information from /proc/PID/status but I just want to use it as the backup plan.

So, is it possible to get the PPID by giving a PID number? getppid(2) can only get the PPID of current process so it's not helpful in this situation.

Any idea? Thank you.

Answer 1

I think you can use get_proc_stats function to do this. But you need to install the libproc-dev library.

Here is an example :

proc_t p_info;
get_proc_stats(pid_num, &p_info);
int parent_pid = p_info.ppid;