Detecting what apps are open in python [duplicate] - python-3.x

Question

I amm writing a little python script that will grab information from VMs of Windows that I am running.
At the moment I can list the processes on a 32bit XP machine with the following method:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/305279/
Is it possible to somehow detect the version of windows running and excute a different method for getting the processes on a 64bit machine, I am trying to get the processes from a 64Bit Vista and 64bit Windows 7.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you don't want to rely on any extra installed modules then you can parse the output of wmic, e.g.:
c:\> wmic process get description,executablepath
...
explorer.exe C:\Windows\explorer.exe
cmd.exe C:\Windows\SysWOW64\cmd.exe
conhost.exe C:\Windows\system32\conhost.exe
...
Reference: http://geekpedia.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/use-command-line-to-track-windows-processes/

Answer 2

There is another recipe on activestate that does a similar thing, but uses the Performance Data Helper library (PDH) instead.
I have tested this on my Windows 7 64bit machine and it works there - so presumably the same function will work on both 32bit and 64 bit windows.
You can find the recipe here: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/303339/
Another method is using WMI, there is an example here in Python using the wmi module:
http://timgolden.me.uk/python/wmi/cookbook.html
import wmi
c = wmi.WMI ()
for process in c.Win32_Process ():
print process.ProcessId, process.Name

Answer 3

The cleanest way I found to solve this was to use the psutil library as recommended by Robert Lujo:
psutil.process_iter()
Note that it returns a generator object, issuing a process object at a time. For example if you need the list of process names, you can do something like:
[p.name() for p in psutil.process_iter()]

Answer 4

For similar purposes I have used psutil library. Some hints:
list processes with psutil.pids() (reference)
inspect process information with process = psutil.Process(pid) (reference)
do process.kill or process.terminate()
Installation on windows - pip will do installation from the source (which means compiling), so you probably want to download binary installation from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil/#downloads.

Answer 5

You should be able to do this by exposing Windows Management Instrumentation within each VM. This tool gives you access to a bunch of system data, including processes, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc757287%28WS.10%29.aspx
You should be able to popen one of the commands in the preceding link to get the info you're looking for.