List running processes on 64-bit Windows

Question

I amm writing a little python script that will grab information from VMs of Windows that I am running.

At the moment I can list the processes on a 32bit XP machine with the following method:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/305279/

Is it possible to somehow detect the version of windows running and excute a different method for getting the processes on a 64bit machine, I am trying to get the processes from a 64Bit Vista and 64bit Windows 7.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The cleanest way I found to solve this was to use the psutil library as recommended by Robert Lujo:

psutil.process_iter()

Note that it returns a generator object, issuing a process object at a time. For example if you need the list of process names, you can do something like:

[p.name() for p in psutil.process_iter()]

Answer 2

There is another recipe on activestate that does a similar thing, but uses the Performance Data Helper library (PDH) instead.

I have tested this on my Windows 7 64bit machine and it works there - so presumably the same function will work on both 32bit and 64 bit windows.

You can find the recipe here: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/303339/

Another method is using WMI, there is an example here in Python using the wmi module:

http://timgolden.me.uk/python/wmi/cookbook.html

import wmi
c = wmi.WMI ()

for process in c.Win32_Process ():
  print process.ProcessId, process.Name