runstatus - detect if a program is already running

Knowing if a program is already running can be useful in many situations. For example

avoid running operations that do not expect to be executed twice or more simultaneously
improve the usability of a software so that the user does not end up having multiple instances of the same program open at once.

runstatus is a cross-platform python library that will help you in detecting if your program was yet up and running.

It is trivial to use:

import runstatus

if runstatus.already_running('myAppName'):
    print('do something, e.g. exiting')
    exit(0)

The library comes with these functions:

already_running(codeName)
detects if this same program is running in a different process
get_system_start_time()
get the time at which the computer was turned on in unixtime
process_exists(pid)
check if a process with that id is running
process_kill(pid)
if a process with that id exists, kills it

Install

Either use

pip install runstatus

or download the sources and run

python setup.py install

No dependencies are required. Run on python 2.7 or 3.x

Currently works on Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS

runstatus is licensed under the Apache License (see LICENSE file)