How to check if there exists a process with a given pid in Python?

Is there a way to check to see if a pid corresponds to a valid process? I'm getting a pid from a different source other than from os.getpid() and I need to check to see if a process with that pid doesn't exist on the machine.

I need it to be available in Unix and Windows. I'm also checking to see if the PID is NOT in use.

Solution 1:

Sending signal 0 to a pid will raise an OSError exception if the pid is not running, and do nothing otherwise.

import os

def check_pid(pid):        
    """ Check For the existence of a unix pid. """
    try:
        os.kill(pid, 0)
    except OSError:
        return False
    else:
        return True

Solution 2:

Have a look at the psutil module:

psutil (python system and process utilities) is a cross-platform library for retrieving information on running processes and system utilization (CPU, memory, disks, network) in Python. [...] It currently supports Linux, Windows, OSX, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris, both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, with Python versions from 2.6 to 3.4 (users of Python 2.4 and 2.5 may use 2.1.3 version). PyPy is also known to work.

It has a function called pid_exists() that you can use to check whether a process with the given pid exists.

Here's an example:

import psutil
pid = 12345
if psutil.pid_exists(pid):
    print("a process with pid %d exists" % pid)
else:
    print("a process with pid %d does not exist" % pid)

For reference:

• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil
• https://github.com/giampaolo/psutil
• http://pythonhosted.org/psutil/#psutil.pid_exists