Splitting out the output of ps using Python

Question

On Linux, the command ps aux outputs a list of processes with multiple columns for each stat. e.g.

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START          


        

Answer 1

Check out the python.psutils package.

psutil.process_iter returns a generator which you can use to iterate over all processes. p.cmdline is a list of each Process object's cmdline arguments, separated just the way you want.

You can create a dictionary of pids vs (pid,cmdline,path) with just one line and then use it anyway you want.

pid_dict = dict([(p.pid, dict([('pid',p.pid), ('cmdline',p.cmdline), ('path',p.path)]))
                 for p in psutil.process_iter()]))