What's the maximum pid for Mac OS X?

Question

The Mac OS X Internals book states that the maximum process identifier is 30,000 and after that the kernel will start re-using pids. But checking on my own system, via:

ps a | grep ps | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}'

I can see that I have pids that go higher. Does anyone know if there is a pid_max explicitly set somewhere, like in Linux?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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