Programmatically Getting Process ID

[Patrick Phalen]

[Samuel A. Falvo II, on Fri, 03 Mar 2000]
:: Is there a way that I can programmatically obtain a process ID for a
:: particularly named process?  For example, I'd like to be able to do this:
:: 
:: 	pid = get_pid_of( "radiusd" )
:: 	kill( pid, SIGHUP )
:: 
:: What would get_pid_of() be defined as?


How about:

def get_pid_of(name):
    thispid = os.getpid() # in case script has the search string in its name
    cmd = "%s%s" % ('ps -ef | grep ', name)
    procs = os.popen(cmd).readlines()
    for line in procs:
        g = string.split(line)
        try:
            pid = g[1]
        except IndexError:
            print 'oops'
            raise SystemExit
        else:
            pid = int(pid)
            if pid == thispid:
                pass
            else:
                os.kill(pid, SIGHUP)

figuring out how to keep from delivering an error to stdout for child
processes is left as an exercise for those less lazy than I