How do you get the process ID of a program in Unix or Linux using Python?

I'm writing some monitoring scripts in Python and I'm trying to find the cleanest way to get the process ID of any random running program given the name of that program

something like

ps -ef | grep MyProgram

I could parse the output of that however I thought there might be a better way in python

From the standard library:

os.getpid()

If you are not limiting yourself to the standard library, I like psutil for this.

For instance to find all "python" processes:

>>> import psutil
>>> [p.info for p in psutil.process_iter(attrs=['pid', 'name']) if 'python' in p.info['name']]
[{'name': 'python3', 'pid': 21947},
 {'name': 'python', 'pid': 23835}]