Question

I need to get a list of all possible running processes(whether they are stopped currently or not) from the system, without keeping a record myself.

I was wondering if there is a better way to get a list of these processes in python without having to do the dreaded subprocess output parsing of an initctl list call.

Answer 1

You can go through /proc/<pid>/cmdline to get the running process names. You need to list the files in /proc and filter the numerical ones for getting access to list of the processes running on your system.

However I wouldn’t call this accessing “all possible running processes” because that would include kernel threads as well.