Identifying python processes

Question

Is there anyway to uniquely identify python processes running on Windows 7?

I am writing an installer that needs to kill a python process for the installation to continue, the problem is there are multiple python processes running and I need to make sure I kill the correct one!

Could you modify the code of that python process you want to kill? — kennytm
– kennytm, Commented Sep 2, 2013 at 17:25
see this stackoverflow.com/questions/12554176/… or this : stackoverflow.com/questions/16326529/… — dzada
– dzada, Commented Sep 2, 2013 at 17:26
I need to kill a specific python process as the installer updates this process. There are multiple python processes running ('pythonw.exe'). — jossgray
– jossgray, Commented Sep 2, 2013 at 17:30
@jossgray The only reliable way is to modify this specific process' code so that it will store its own PID somewhere on disk. Then you can easily kill it. — freakish
– freakish, Commented Sep 2, 2013 at 17:32

g.d.d.c · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-02 17:40:31Z

3

Presuming you know the command line your program was called with the first time, it might be something like this:

for p in psutil.get_process_list():
  if p.cmdline[0].endswith('pythonw.exe') and p.cmdline[1] == 'myscript.py':
    print p.pid

Be careful when traversing the cmdlines of various programs though, they have different numbers of elements and can't be reliably unpacked (though I think python 3 has some support for variable length sequence unpacking). Anyway, worth a try.

answered Sep 2, 2013 at 17:40

g.d.d.c

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2 Comments

jfs Over a year ago

len(p.cmdline) would return number of elements in the list on any Python version.

g.d.d.c Over a year ago

Definitely, I was just warning against prog, arg = p.cmdline blindly.

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