How to Find and List All Running Processes in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to find and list all running processes in Python. It is a very simple program.

Python program to find and list all running processes

To do this, we need psutil library. Let us install it.

pip install psutil

Now, we need to import it into our program.

import psutil

We have a method called process_iter which iterates all the running processes. This method is present within the psutil library. That’s the reason we have imported it into our program.

c=0
for process in psutil.process_iter ():
    c=c+1
    Name = process.name () # Name of the process
    ID = process.pid # ID of the process
    print ("Process name =", Name ,",","Process ID =", ID)
print ("\nTotal number of running process are ", c)

For every process that is running, we are getting its name and ID using the name and pid methods.

To count the total number of running processes, I used the variable ‘c’ and incremented it for every process.

Output:

Process name = System Idle Process , Process ID = 0
Process name = System , Process ID = 4
Process name = Registry , Process ID = 96
Process name = RuntimeBroker.exe , Process ID = 336
Process name = smss.exe , Process ID = 404
Process name = svchost.exe , Process ID = 448
Process name = csrss.exe , Process ID = 512
 . . . 
Process name = chrome.exe , Process ID = 8864
Process name = svchost.exe , Process ID = 8880
Process name = svchost.exe , Process ID = 8936
Process name = svchost.exe , Process ID = 8948
Process name = csrss.exe , Process ID = 8980
Process name = ApntEx.exe , Process ID = 9132

Total number of running process are 145

The output varies from system to system. It depends on the processes that are running at that moment. At this moment there are 145 running processes in my system.

Also read, Python next() Function with examples