Getting another process's pid

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

I'd like to identify another process's ID and work with it via perl. While I was searching, I came across a Bash answer.

ps ax | awk '/programname/ && !/awk/ {print $1}'
[download]

How can I achieve the same result in perl and assign the return value to a simple scalar?

Comment on Getting another process's pid Download Code

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Re: Getting another process's pid by broquaint (Abbot) on Feb 10, 2004 at 12:07 UTC
If it's supported by your system you could always use `Proc::ProcessTable` e.g `my $pt = Proc::ProcessTable->new; print "Found $progname running under $_->{pid}\n" for grep { $_->{pid} != $$ && $_->{cmndline} =~ /$progname/ } @{ $pt->table };` [download] HTH `_________ broquaint`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Getting another process's pid by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Feb 10, 2004 at 12:27 UTC
If something works for you, it's very Perlish to incorporate that in your Perl program. Perl is, after all, a very succesfull glue language. my $pid = `ps ax \| awk '/programname/ && !/awk/ {print \$1}`; # ;-) [download] Or you could do: `open my $ps => "ps ax \|" or die; my $pid; while (<$ps>) { if (/^\s(\d+).\bprogramname\b/) { $pid = $1; last; } } close $ps or die;` [download] If you happen to run Solaris, you could make use of `psgrep` instead of `ps`. Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]