Pythonic way to return a boolean value and a message [duplicate]

Question

I have a simple script that checks various Linux processes and, finding one of them, logs a particular message ("particular" in terms of referencing the service's name).

My question: what is the proper, Pythonic way to have a multi-conditional function return a boolean and a string (for use in a printed message)?

Here's a stripped-down version of my current solution (using tuples):

import subprocess
import time

def _isProcessRunning(cmd):
    return int(
            subprocess.check_output(
                '{} | grep -v grep | wc -l'.format(cmd),
                shell=True
                )
            ) > 0

def processGroupFound():
    if _isProcessRunning('ps auwxx | grep duplicity'):
        return (True, 'Duplicity')
    elif _isProcessRunning('who | grep pts'):
        return (True, 'SSH')
    elif _isProcessRunning('netstat -na | grep ESTA | grep 5901'):
        return (True, 'VNC')
    else:
        return (False, '')

def worker():
    while True:
        process_found, service_string = processGroupFound()
        if process_found:
            print('{} found; skipping'.format(service_string))
        else:
            print('Continuing on')
        time.sleep(10)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    worker()

This works, but I care about doing it correctly (stylistically, in particular, but if you glean incorrect logic in this brief sample, please feel free to comment there, too. Appreciate your assistance!

Answer 1

An empty string in Python is "falsey", so it's somewhat redundant to return (False, ''). I might do this instead:

def processGroupFound():
    if _isProcessRunning('ps auwxx | grep duplicity'):
        return 'Duplicity'
    elif _isProcessRunning('who | grep pts'):
        return 'SSH'
    elif _isProcessRunning('netstat -na | grep ESTA | grep 5901'):
        return 'VNC'
    else:
        return ''

def worker():
    while True:
        service_string = processGroupFound()
        if service_string:
            print('{} found; skipping'.format(service_string))
        else:
            print('Continuing on')
        time.sleep(10)

(See 4.1 Truth Value Testing)

Answer 2

I think this would be pythonic too (but may be it's just me)

class NoRunningService(RuntimeError): pass

def findService():
    if _isProcessRunning('ps auwxx | grep duplicity'):
        return 'Duplicity'
    elif _isProcessRunning('who | grep pts'):
        return 'SSH'
    elif _isProcessRunning('netstat -na | grep ESTA | grep 5901'):
        return 'VNC'
    else:
        raise NoRunningService

def worker():
    while True:
        try:
            service_string = findService()
        except NoRunningService:
            print('Continuing on')
        else:
            print('{} found; skipping'.format(service_string))
        time.sleep(10)