creating-a-pid.md

Creating A PID

Often times, when invoking a function that spawns a process, the PID of the spawned process is returned and we bind to it. That PID is a reference to some BEAM process in our system.

We can create our own references using the pid/3 function.

Let's assume we have the following processes, among others, in our system at the moment.

> Process.list |> Enum.reverse |> Enum.take(3)
[#PID<0.284.0>, #PID<0.283.0>, #PID<0.282.0>]

We can create a reference to any of them using the three number parts that they are made up of.

> pid(0, 284, 0)
#PID<0.284.0>

See, it's alive.

> pid(0, 284, 0) |> Process.alive?
true

What if we make up a PID that doesn't actually reference any process?

> pid(0, 333, 0) |> Process.alive?
false

Note: there is also a pid/1 version of the function. See h pid for more details.