Thread: How To Check if process is associated with invoking terminal?

I'm pretty sure the invoking terminal is the process' parent, in which case you can just use: getppid(2): process identification - Linux man page.

You'll want to recursively check the parent's pid just in case it's a subprocess:

Code:

113 (terminal process)
|
-- 175 proc1
    |
    -- 176 subproc1

"Controlling terminal" refers to a device, and a device is not a process (it's a kernel interface) and therefore does not have a process id. You can find the device name of the controlling terminal with tty:

Originally Posted by man page for tty

tty - print the file name of the terminal connected to standard input

These correspond to the "TTY" field in ps output.

Getppid() will usually return the pid of the executing bash shell (presuming the system uses bash). For a process started from the "real" non-GUI console (a /dev/tty), the parent id of the shell will then be the login process which was first spawned by the getty (different distros use different forms of getty) process which opened the tty interface. Normally, the parent process of both the login and the getty is 1 (init). Ie, the getty is not in the process's parent chain.

For gui consoles (/dev/pts), the parent process of the bash will be the terminal emulator application (eg, "gnome-terminal").

"ps" sans -A includes the terminal shell and all its attached descendents. So, you could either trace back to a terminal emulator process or a login process (and not include them, since ps does not), or (probably a better idea...) you could just get the pid of the shell and include it in the list.

You could also have a look at the real ps source code, of course.