How do you get the process ID of a program in Unix or Linux using Python?

user_252253 0
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I'm writing some monitoring scripts in Python and I'm trying to find the cleanest way to get the process ID of any random running program given the name of that program

something like

ps -ef | grep MyProgram

I could parse the output of that however I thought there might be a better way in python

python
9 Answers

With psutil:

(can be installed with [sudo] pip install psutil)

import psutil

# Get current process pid
current_process_pid = psutil.Process().pid
print(current_process_pid)  # e.g 12971

# Get pids by program name
program_name = 'chrome'
process_pids = [process.pid for process in psutil.process_iter() if process.name == program_name]
print(process_pids)  # e.g [1059, 2343, ..., ..., 9645]
user_4517100

This is a simplified variation of Fernando's answer. This is for Linux and either Python 2 or 3. No external library is needed, and no external process is run.

import glob

def get_command_pid(command):
    for path in glob.glob('/proc/*/comm'):
        if open(path).read().rstrip() == command:
            return path.split('/')[2]

Only the first matching process found will be returned, which works well for some purposes. To get the PIDs of multiple matching processes, you could just replace the return with yield, and then get a list with pids = list(get_command_pid(command)).

Alternatively, as a single expression:

For one process:

next(path.split('/')[2] for path in glob.glob('/proc/*/comm') if open(path).read().rstrip() == command)

For multiple processes:

[path.split('/')[2] for path in glob.glob('/proc/*/comm') if open(path).read().rstrip() == command]
user_6711300
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