Can I see how long a process has been running?

soffen has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

If I know the process id (PID) of a process that is (or should be) running (like a script that takes 3 to 5 or more minuts to run), can I use it in a seperate script (like, haveing the process write its PID to a file, and having the other script open the file and read the PID) to check how long that process has been running and/or if it is still running? if so, how?

Comment on Can I see how long a process has been running?

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Re: Can I see how long a process has been running? by fglock (Vicar) on Sep 30, 2002 at 16:26 UTC
This works for me (FreeBSD - it is not portable): $process = 224; @a = `ps -p $process`; @b=split(/\s+/,$a[1]); print $b[4]; [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Can I see how long a process has been running? by robartes (Priest) on Sep 30, 2002 at 17:49 UTC
Hi soffen, you could try parsing the output from ps, but a search of CPAN for "process managment" turns up the module Proc::Processtable::Process. You should specifically be interested in the time and start methods, respectively to get the CPU time and (with a bit of arithmetic) the wall time consumption of the process.	[reply]
Re: Re: Can I see how long a process has been running? by BazB (Priest) on Sep 30, 2002 at 18:30 UTC
You should really look at Proc::ProcessTable - Proc::Processtable::Process only provides OO accessor methods to Proc::ProcessTable objects. Check the README with the module for a list of the available information for your platform. BTW, the cache_tty option speeds Proc::ProcessTable up quite a bit when there are a lot of processes, however it requires Storable. Cheers. BazB.	[reply]
Re: Can I see how long a process has been running? by Moonie (Friar) on Sep 30, 2002 at 16:24 UTC
Take a look at this node. - Moon	[reply]