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Answer 1

+2 A:

There are a couple of options,

1: the more crude but obvious would be to do some text processing against:

os.popen('tasklist').read()

2: A more involved option would be to use pywin32 and research the win32 APIs to figure out what processes are running.

3: WMI (I found this just now), and here is a vbscript example of how to query the machine for processes through WMI.

andyortlieb 2010-07-09 18:04:17

Just to offer a bit more clarification, the first option becomes extremely simple with a regex search>>> bool ( re.search('notepad.exe',os.popen('tasklist').read()) )

andyortlieb 2010-07-09 18:12:08

You don't even need regex. A simple `if substring in string:`-type statement works just fine. (Or rather, `not in`, since it's supposed to execute when the process isn't active.)

JAB 2010-07-09 18:16:03

This is exactly what I needed! Thansk so much!

Zachary Brown 2010-07-09 18:25:03

I did this: import os process = os.popen("tasklist").read() if "notepad" in process: print "Process Running" else: print "Process Terminated"It work perfectly! Thanks again for everyones help!

Zachary Brown 2010-07-09 18:26:52

I would like to point out, you risk a relatively unlikely false positive if another process has the substring "notepad.exe" within its own name, but you'll notice that every process is the the first thing on its line, so it may suffice to search for "\nnotepad.exe", to include that new line.

andyortlieb 2010-07-09 19:05:27

Answer 2

+6 A:

The process creation functions of the os module are apparently deprecated in Python 2.6 and later, with the subprocess module being the module of choice now, so...

if 'notepad.exe' not in subprocess.Popen('tasklist', stdout=subprocess.PIPE).communicate()[0]:
    subprocess.Popen('notepad.exe')

Note that in Python 3, the string being checked will need to be a bytes object, so it'd be

if b'notepad.exe' not in [blah]:
    subprocess.Popen('notepad.exe')

(The name of the file/process to start does not need to be a bytes object.)

JAB 2010-07-09 18:14:52

+1, That is an important point. I went with os.process() for the sake of shorter demonstration, but it is important to note that subprocess is far more powerful (and of course not deprecated).

andyortlieb 2010-07-09 18:56:29

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