Determine what the calling program is

[Jason Friedman]

I should state at the start that I have a solution to my problem. I am
writing to see if there is a better solution.

I have a program that runs via crontab every five minutes. It polls a
Box.com folder for files and, if any are found, it copies them locally and
performs a computation on them that can exceed five minutes. It pushes the
results back up to Box. (Box.com ensures that only complete files are
visible when I poll.) Files are dropped into this Box.com folder rarely,
but to ensure a good customer experience I do not want to set my crontab to
run less frequently. My hardware cannot support multiple simultaneous
computations.

I have written a piece of code to detect if more than 1 instance of my
program is running, and I put this code into a separate module (support.py)
so that other programs can use it.

support.py contains:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
import sys
def check(calling_program):
    import psutil
    # some logic here to count
    # count = N
    if count > 1:
        print(f"I was called by {calling_program}.")
        sys.exit()
if __name__ == "__main__":
    check()
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

actual-program.py contains:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
import support.py
support.check(__file__)
# Poll, and if files download, perform expensive computations, push results
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To me it would be more elegant to be able to do something like this:

def check():
    # Something here that tells me the name of the calling program
    import psutil
    # ...

And then the calling program just does:
support.check()