I would use the subprocess module to execute the command ps with appropriate options. By adding options you can modify which processes you see. Lot's of examples on subprocess on SO. This question answers how to parse the output of ps for example:)
PSI is a Python package providing real-time access to processes and other miscellaneous system information such as architecture, boottime and filesystems. It has a pythonic API which is consistent accross all supported platforms but also exposes platform-specific details where desirable.
IMO looking at the /proc filesystem is less nasty than hacking the text output of ps.
import os
pids = [pid for pid in os.listdir('/proc') if pid.isdigit()]
for pid in pids:
try:
print open(os.path.join('/proc', pid, 'cmdline'), 'rb').read().split('\0')
except IOError: # proc has already terminated
continue
The command is broken down into a python list of arguments so that it does not need to be run in a shell (By default the subprocess.Popen does not use any kind of a shell environment it just execs it). Because of this we cant simply supply 'ps -U 0' to Popen.
from psutil import process_iter
from termcolor import colored
names = []
ids = []
x = 0
z = 0
k = 0
for proc in process_iter():
name = proc.name()
y = len(name)
if y>x:
x = y
if y<x:
k = y
id = proc.pid
names.insert(z, name)
ids.insert(z, id)
z += 1
print(colored("Process Name", 'yellow'), (x-k-5)*" ", colored("Process Id", 'magenta'))
for b in range(len(names)-1):
z = x
print(colored(names[b], 'cyan'),(x-len(names[b]))*" ",colored(ids[b], 'white'))