Finding The Current Process ID

Question

Is there a way to get the current process ID from a Java application running on Winows XP?
Better yet, is there a way to specify the process ID of your application from the command line?
I'm guessing the answer to the second question is no, but that there is an answer to the first question.
TIA,
John

Answer 1

The argument that getpid() is not available because it is not platform independent is not really very convincing.
It's quite likely that there are a number of platforms that don't have networking and therefore a large chunk of Java could be considered platform dependent. Of again it's likely that some platforms don't distinguish between output and error output streams so System.err and System.out would also seem platform dependent.
It's fairly clear that most platforms that we care to program for do have the concept of a process and most will also support the concept of a process identifier therefore in most cases getpid() would seem a reasonable api to support - for those platforms that do not support the concept of a process id we coud throw an exception or return null or whatever.
The process id would be useful for generating UUID's but another case where I've found if useful is passing it to databases as a connection parameter so that if/when a particular db connection is misbehaving I can trivially lookup the PID associated with that connection on the db and then go to the OS and find out which process instance owns that connection and debug/restart or whatever.