How do I check if a process is running in C

Applications Programming
1

How to I check if a process is running in C? I'm trying to use ps aux |grep "process name" but failing in doing that. How do I do that?

Thanks,

2

You may want to use pidof. This prints the pid of the running process on the stdout.

Usually its available at path /sbin/pidof; hence either you need to be the superuser or have the read access.

The command is

Your Prompt] # pidof -x <your process name>

Use as below in your C code (although not advices to use the system(<cmd>) in a C code but then you already used the same):

int
main() {
   /*
   ** Code snippet.
   */
   if(0 == system("pidof -x PROCESS > /dev/null")) {
      //A process having name PROCESS is running.
   }
   else if(1 == system("pidof -x PROCESS > /dev/null")) {
      //A process having name PROCESS is NOT running.
   }

   /*
   ** Continue processing further.
   */
return STATUS;
}

Look at the return value to decide on its running status. You can get this by executing, from the command prompt, another command 'echo $?' immediately after executing the pidof.