Question

Several processes with the same name are running on host. What is the cross-platform way to get PIDs of those processes by name using python or jython?

1. I want something like pidof but in python. (I don’t have pidof anyway.)
2. I can’t parse /proc because it might be unavailable (on HP-UX).
3. I do not want to run os.popen('ps') and parse the output because I think it is ugly (field sequence may be different in different OS).
4. Target platforms are Solaris, HP-UX, and maybe others.

Answer 1

You can use psutil (https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil), which works on Windows and UNIX:

import psutil

PROCNAME = "python.exe"

for proc in psutil.process_iter():
    if proc.name() == PROCNAME:
        print(proc)

On my machine it prints:

<psutil.Process(pid=3881, name='python.exe') at 140192133873040>

EDIT 2017-04-27 – here’s a more advanced utility function which checks the name against processes’ name(), cmdline() and exe():

import os
import psutil

def find_procs_by_name(name):
    "Return a list of processes matching 'name'."
    assert name, name
    ls = []
    for p in psutil.process_iter():
        name_, exe, cmdline = "", "", []
        try:
            name_ = p.name()
            cmdline = p.cmdline()
            exe = p.exe()
        except (psutil.AccessDenied, psutil.ZombieProcess):
            pass
        except psutil.NoSuchProcess:
            continue
        if name == name_ or cmdline[0] == name or os.path.basename(exe) == name:
            ls.append(p)
    return ls