Getting pid and details for topmost window

Question

Does anyone know how to get the PID of the top active window and then how to get the properties of the window using the PID? I mean properties like process name, program nam

Answer 1

Am very very late to the party, but I had a similar problem, and I think this can help someone else who has the same problem. There is a command line trick to do this, you can try execvp'ing it, or executing it redirecting the output to your code

xprop -id $(xprop -root _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW | cut -d ' ' -f 5) _NET_WM_NAME WM_CLASS

gives the window name, as well as the program name. Eg, for this tab, it gives me

_NET_WM_NAME(UTF8_STRING) = "linux - Getting pid and details for topmost window - Stack Overflow - Mozilla Firefox"

WM_CLASS(STRING) = "Navigator", "Firefox"