Check if a process is running or not on Windows with Python

Question

I am trying to create a python script which I will later run as a service. Now I want to run a particular part of the code only when iTunes is running. I understand from some research that polling the entire command list and then searching for the application for that list is expensive.

I found out that processes on UNIX-based operating systems create a lock file to notify that a program is currently running, at which point we can use os.stat(location_of_file) to check if the file exists to determine if a program is running or not.

Is there a similar lock file created on Windows?

If not what are the various ways in Python by which we can determine if a process is running or not?

I am using python 2.7 and iTunes COM interface.

Answer 1

You can not rely on lock files in Linux or Windows. I would just bite the bullet and iterate through all the running programs. I really do not believe it will be as "expensive" as you think. psutil is an excellent cross-platform python module cable of enumerating all the running programs on a system.

import psutil    
"someProgram" in (p.name() for p in psutil.process_iter())