process id from os.system

[Michael Hudson]

j vickroy <jvickroy at sec.noaa.gov> writes:

> How can I obtain the process id for a program launched via
> 
>   os.system (theProgram) ?
> 
> I would like to do this portability (Unix, Windows).
> 
> Presently on Unix, I'm getting the pid by parsing the output from:
> 
>   "ps -ef | grep theProgram"
> 
> but that seems messy and unreliable since "theProgram" may be truncated
> in the output from ps.

I think you should be able to use the os.spawn* functions in
1.6^H^H^H2.0 for this, eg:

>>> os.spawnlp(os.P_NOWAIT,"xterm","xterm")
4722

the spawn* functions are easy-ish to implement in terms of exec* &
fork; look here:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/python/dist/src/Lib/os.py?rev=1.35&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=python

HTH,
Michael

-- 
8. A programming language is low level when its programs require
   attention to the irrelevant.
  -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html