Finding out what other tasks are running

[Tim Golden]

Jeremy C B Nicoll wrote:
> Is there a cross-platform of determining what other processes (or in Windows
> terms, other applications) are running?
> 
> Is it possible in a cross-platform way to ask some other application to shut
> down, wait a while, and then test to see if it did shut?
> 
> Failing that are there separate Windows, Mac and Linux/Unix ways of doing
> this?

Sorry, thought I'd part-answered this a while back; doesn't seem
to have shown up. In short, I don't believe there's anything
truly x-platform. On Windows, one approach is WMI. Here's an
example:

http://tgolden.sc.sabren.com/python/wmi_cookbook.html#running_processes

There are other techniques, such as querying the top-level
windows or using the performance objects from the pywin32
modules.

TJG