get PID from paramiko

Question

I can't find a simple answer for this: I'm using paramiko to log in and execute a number of processes remotely and I need the PIDs of each process in order to check on them at later times. There doesn't seem to be a function in paramiko to get the PID of an executed command, so I tried using the following:

stdin,stdout,stderr = ssh.exec_command('./someScript.sh &;echo $!;)

I thought that then parsing through the stdout would return the PID, but it doesn't. I'm assuming I should run the script in the background in order to have a PID (while it is running). Is there a more simple, obvious, way of getting the PID?

Answer 1

Here's a way to obtain the remote process ID:

def execute(channel, command):
    command = 'echo $$; exec ' + command
    stdin, stdout, stderr = channel.exec_command(command)
    pid = int(stdout.readline())
    return pid, stdin, stdout, stderr