runstatus 1.0

a library to detect if a program is already running

Knowing if a program is already running can be useful in many situations. For example

• avoid running operations that do not expect to be executed twice or more simultaneously

• improve the usability of a software so that the user does not end up having multiple instances of the same program open at once.

All of this in a cross-platform python library .

The library is trivial to use:

import runstatus

if runstatus.already_running('myAppName'):
    print('do something, e.g. exiting')
    exit(0)

The library comes with various functions:

• already_running(codeName) tells you if this same program is running in a different process

• get_system_start_time() will give you the time when the computer was turned on in unixtime

• process_exists(pid) will tell you if a process with that id is running

• process_kill(pid) will kill the process with that id if exists

Install

Either use

pip install runstatus

or download the sources and run

python setup.py install

No dependencies are required. Run on python 2.7 or 3.x

Download

The git repository is available at https://github.com/riquito/runstatus

OS supported

Currently works on Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS

Copyright and License

runstatus was developed by Riccardo Attilio Galli <[e-mail]> and is licensed under the Apache License (see LICENSE file)

Website

http://www.sideralis.org