Apple - What's the maximum pid for Mac OS X?
Looking at sys/proc_internal.h in xnu-1699.24.23, I find that PID_MAX is 99999. The value is used in kern_fork.c in the function forkproc
. Looking at that function, process IDs are not assigned equal to PID_MAX, so the highest possible pid is 99998.
Kyle's answer is still valid as of today. In case you want to verify that, here is a shell script:
#!/bin/bash
pid=0
for i in {1..100000}; do
: &
if [ $! -lt $pid ]; then
echo "Min pid: $!"
echo "Max pid: $pid"
break
fi
pid=$!
done
This prints:
Min pid: 100
Max pid: 99998