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Process ID
 (
PID
), which we mentioned in the 
Managing jobs
 
section. Before we continue on, the PID is something that you really should be 
familiar with, so we may as well cover it right now.
Each process running on your server is assigned a PID, which differentiates it from 
other processes on your system. You may understand a process as 
vim
, or 
top
, or 
some other name. However, our server knows processes by their ID. When you 
open a program or start a process, it's given a PID by the kernel. As you work on 
managing your server, you'll find that the PID is useful to know, especially for the 
commands we'll be covering in this very chapter. If you want to kill a misbehaving 
process, for example, a typical workflow would be for you to find the PID of that 
process and then reference that PID when you go to kill the process (which I'll show 
you how to do in a later section). PIDs are actually more complex than just a number 
assigned to running processes, but for the purposes of this chapter, that's the main 
purpose we'll need to remember.
You can also
 use the 
pidof
 command to find the PID of a process if you
 know the 
name of it. For example, I showed you a screenshot of a 
vim
 process running with a 
PID of 
41267
. You can also do so by running the following command:
pidof vim 

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Chapter 7