This page describes some common utilities that should be avoided, and what you should use instead.
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pidof
pidof is a strange program. It's typically a symlink to the killall5 program that's part of the sysvinit package, and is used by init to send signals to all processes. If invoked as pidof, it returns the pid of the given program. pidof Is highly nonstandard and probably used so frequently due to its intuitive name more than anything.
Alternatives
procps -- pgrep. See ProcessManagement.
killall
Alternatives
which
Alternatives
xargs
Alternatives
expr
Alternatives
(()), let