Determining running programs in Python

Question

How would I use Python to determine what programs are currently running. I am on Windows.

Solution 1

Thanks to @hb2pencil for the WMIC command! Here's how you can pipe the output without a file:

import subprocess
cmd = 'WMIC PROCESS get Caption,Commandline,Processid'
proc = subprocess.Popen(cmd, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
for line in proc.stdout:
    print line

Solution 2

import os
os.system('WMIC /OUTPUT:C:\ProcessList.txt PROCESS get Caption,Commandline,Processid')
f = open("C:\ProcessList.txt")
plist = f.readlines()
f.close()

Now plist contains a formatted whitespace-separated list of processes:

• The first column is the name of the executable that is running
• The second column is the command that represents the running process
• The third column is the process ID

This should be simple to parse with python. Note that the first row of data are labels for the columns, and not actual processes.

Note that this method only works on windows!

Solution 3

I was getting access denied with get_pid_list(). A newer method worked for me on windows and OSX:

import psutil

for proc in psutil.process_iter():
    try:
        if proc.name() == u"chrome.exe":
            print(proc)
            print proc.cmdline()
    except psutil.AccessDenied:
        print "Permission error or access denied on process"

Solution 4

Piping information from sub process commands is not ideal compared to an actual python tool meant for getting processes. Try the psutil module. To get a list of process numbers, do:

psutil.get_pid_list()

I'm afraid you have to download this module online, it is not included in python distributions, but this is a better way to solve your problem. To access the name of the process you have a number for, do:

psutil.Process(<number>).name

This should be what you are looking for. Also, here is a way to find if a specific process is running:

def process_exists(name):
    i = psutil.get_pid_list()
    for a in i:
        try:
            if str(psutil.Process(a).name) == name:
                return True
        except:
            pass
    return False

This uses the name of the executable file, so for example, to find a powershell window, you would do this:

process_exists("powershell.exe")

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Comments

[Murkantilism]

Thanks, WMIC worked well. Unfortunately, the output text file wasn't so easy to parse. It's in UTF-16 so I had to decode and re-encode it as ASCII to easily parse using if (processName in procList): return true

[jake77]

get_pid_list() is deprecated, use pids() instead

[user2145184]

I did some testing and for me on win10 psutil takes roughly 10x longer to perform the same task as piping WMIC