How can a Java program get its own process ID?

There exists no platform-independent way that can be guaranteed to work in all jvm implementations. ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean().getName() looks like the best (closest) solution, and typically includes the PID. It's short, and probably works in every implementation in wide use.

On linux+windows it returns a value like "12345@hostname" (12345 being the process id). Beware though that according to the docs, there are no guarantees about this value:

Returns the name representing the running Java virtual machine. The returned name string can be any arbitrary string and a Java virtual machine implementation can choose to embed platform-specific useful information in the returned name string. Each running virtual machine could have a different name.

In Java 9 the new process API can be used:

long pid = ProcessHandle.current().pid();

You can check out my project: JavaSysMon on GitHub. It provides process id and a bunch of other stuff (CPU usage, memory usage) cross-platform (presently Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and Solaris)

public static long getPID() {
    String processName = java.lang.management.ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean().getName();
    if (processName != null && processName.length() > 0) {
        try {
            return Long.parseLong(processName.split("@")[0]);
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            return 0;
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

It depends on where you are looking for the information from.

If you are looking for the information from the console you can use the jps command. The command gives output similar to the Unix ps command and comes with the JDK since I believe 1.5

If you are looking from the process the RuntimeMXBean (as said by Wouter Coekaerts) is probably your best choice. The output from getName() on Windows using Sun JDK 1.6 u7 is in the form [PROCESS_ID]@[MACHINE_NAME]. You could however try to execute jps and parse the result from that:

String jps = [JDK HOME] + "\\bin\\jps.exe";
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(jps);

If run with no options the output should be the process id followed by the name.

I found a solution that may be a bit of an edge case and I didn't try it on other OS than Windows 10, but I think it's worth noticing.

If you find yourself working with J2V8 and nodejs, you can run a simple javascript function returning you the pid of the java process.

Here is an example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    NodeJS nodeJS = NodeJS.createNodeJS();
    int pid = nodeJS.getRuntime().executeIntegerScript("process.pid;\n");
    System.out.println(pid);
    nodeJS.release();
}