In Python, how do you check that an external program is running? I'd like to track my use of some programs, so I can see the amount of time I've spent with them. For example, if I launch my program , I want to be able to see if Chrome has already been launched, and if so, start a timer which would end when I exit Chrome.
Ive seen that then subprocess module can launch external programs, but this is not what I'm looking for.
Thanks in advance.
You are looking for psutil
It is great to get information on the system (CPU / RAM / HD / ...)
And in your case, processes : https://pythonhosted.org/psutil/#processes
Obtaining information on running processes in general depends on the operating system you are using. The Python standard library does not contain a platform-independent way of obtaining this information. There are, however, third-party libraries for this purpose, e.g. psutil.
In my case I would try something using Task Manager data, probably using subprocess.check_output(ps)(for me that looks good), but you can the [psutil][1] library.
Tell us what you did later :)
Related
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I want to write a python3 script to scan through the memory of a running windows process and find strings.
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This is for a CTF binary. It's a typical Windows x86 PE file. The goal is simply to get a flag from the processes memory as it runs. This is easy with ProcessHacker you can search through the strings in the memory of the running application and find the flag with a regex. Now because I'm a masochistic geek I strive to script out solutions for CTFs (for everything really). Specifically I want to use python3, C# is also an option but would really like to keep all of the solution scripts in python.
Thought this would be a very simple task. You know... pip install some library written by someone that's already solved the problem and use it. Couldn't find anything that would let me do what I need for this task. Here are the libraries I tried out already.
ctypes - This was the first one I used, specifically ReadProcessMemory. Kept getting 299 errors which was because the buffer I was passing in was larger than that section of memory so I made a recursive function that would catch that exception, divide the buffer length by 2 until it got something THEN would read one byte at a time until it hit a 299 error. May have been on the right track there but I wasn't able to get the flag. I WAS able to find the flag only if I knew the exact address of the flag (which I'd get from process hacker). I may make a separate question on SO to address that, this one is really just me asking the community if something already exists before diving into this.
pymem - A nice wrapper for ctypes but had the same issues as above.
winappdbg - python2.x only. I don't want to use python 2.x.
haystack - Looks like this depends on winappdbg which depends on python 2.x.
angr - This is a possibility, Only scratched the surface with it so far. Looks complicated and it's on the to learn list but don't want to dive into something right now that's not going to solve the issue.
volatility - Looks like this is meant for working with full RAM dumps not for hooking into currently running processes and reading the memory.
My plan at the moment is to dive a bit more into angr to see if that will work, go back to pymem/ctypes and try more things. If all else fails ProcessHacker IS opensource. I'm not fluent in C so it'll take time to figure out how they're doing it. Really hoping there's some python3 library I'm missing or maybe I'm going about this the wrong way.
Ended up writing the script using the frida library. Also have to give soutz to rootbsd because his or her code in the fridump3 project helped greatly.
I saw this post on Medium, and wondered how one might go about managing multiple python scripts.
How I Hacked Amazon's Wifi Button
This describes a system where you need to run one or more scripts continuously to catch and react to events in your network.
My question: Let's say I had multiple python scripts that I wanted to do run while I work on other things. What approaches are available to manage these scripts? I have to imagine there is a better way than having a large number of terminal windows running each script individually.
I am coming back to python, and have no formal training in computer programming, so any guidance you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
Let's say I had multiple python scripts that I wanted to do run. What
approaches are available to manage these scripts? I have to imagine
there is a better way than having a large number of terminal windows
running each script individually.
If you have several .py files in a directory that you want to run, without having a specific order, you can do:
import glob
pyFiles = glob.glob('path/*.py')
for pyFile in pyFiles:
execfile(pyFile)
Your system already runs a large number of background processes, with output to the system log or occasionally to a service-specific log file.
A common arrangement for quick and dirty deployments -- where you don't necessarily want to invest in making the scripts robust and well-behaved enough to run as proper services -- is to start the script inside screen or tmux. You can detach when you don't need to be looking at it, and can reattach at any time -- even from a remote login -- to view the output, or to troubleshoot.
Take a look at luigi (I've not used it).
https://github.com/spotify/luigi
These days (five years after the question was asked) a lot of people use docker compose. But that's a little heavy weight depending on what you want to do.
I just saw today the script server of bugy. Maybe it might be a solution for you or somebody else.
(I am just trying to find a tampermonkey script structure for python..)
I want something that will receive me the processes details, like I receive with 'ps' command in linux,
get 2 basically types- CPU usage and Memory Used.
today to get this I am using uncomfortable way:
subprocess.check_output(["ps", "aux"])
........
and parse the output of this..
any idea or solution way is acceptable!
Thanks!
Checkout the psutil package. I don't know of a way using strictly the stdlib.
I would suggest that you use psutil
Typical usage and example for a process:
psUtilInfo - psutil.Process(pid)
cpuPercentage = int(psUtilInfo.get_cpu_percent())
memoryInfo, _vms =psUtilInfo.get_memory_info()
To get all processes
psutil.get_pid_list()
I think you can also get more information like this from this module.
Recently I've found myself testing an aplication in Froglogic's Squish, using Python to create test scripts. Just the other day, the question of how much memory the program is using has come up, and I've found myself unable to answer it.
It seems reasonable to assume that there's a way to query the os (windows 7) API for the information, but I've no idea where to begin. Does anyone know how I'd go about this?
this answer has some code (for windows and unix):
Total memory used by Python process?
on win, you are checking Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process and on linux it's /proc/pid/status (or ps)
Remember that Squish allows remote testing of the application. A system parameter queried via Python directly will only apply to the case of local testing.
An approach that works in either case is to call the currentApplicationContext() function that will give you a handle to the Application Under Test. It has a usedMemory property you can query. I don't recall which process property exactly is being queried but it should provide a rough indication.
In command line: tasklist /FO LIST and parse the results?
Sorry, I don't know a Pythonic way. =P
I am trying to write a cross-platform python program that would run in the background, monitor all keyboard events and when it sees some specific shortcuts, it generates one or more keyboard events of its own. For example, this could be handy to have Ctrl-# mapped to "my.email#address", so that every time some program asks me for my email address I just need to type Ctrl-#.
I know such programs already exist, and I am reinventing the wheel... but my goal is just to learn more about low-level keyboard APIs. Moreover, the answer to this question might be useful to other programmers, for example if they want to startup an SSH connection which requires a password, without using pexpect.
Thanks for your help.
Note: there is a similar question but it is limited to the Windows platform, and does not require python. I am looking for a cross-platform python api. There are also other questions related to keyboard events, but apparently they are not interested in system-wide keyboard events, just application-specific keyboard shortcuts.
Edit: I should probably add a disclaimer here: I do not want to write a keylogger. If I needed a keylogger, I could download one off the web a anyway. ;-)
There is no such API. My solution was to write a helper module which would use a different helper depending on the value of os.name.
On Windows, use the Win32 extensions.
On Linux, things are a bit more complex since real OSes protect their users against keyloggers[*]. So here, you will need a root process which watches one of[] the handles in /dev/input/. Your best bet is probably looking for an entry below /dev/input/by-path/ which contains the strings "kbd" or "keyboard". That should work in most cases.
[*]: Jeez, not even my virus/trojan scanner will complain when I start a Python program which hooks into the keyboard events...
As the guy that wrote the original pykeylogger linux port, I can say there isn't really a cross platform one. Essentially I rewrote the pyhook API for keyboard events to capture from the xserver itself, using the record extension. Of course, this assumes the record extension is there, loaded into the x server.
From there, it's essentially just detecting if you're on windows, or linux, and then loading the correct module for the OS. Everything else should be identical.
Take a look at the pykeylogger source, in pyxhook.py for the class and implimentation. Otherwise, just load that module, or pyhook instead, depending on OS.
I've made a few tests on Ubuntu 9.10. pykeylogger doesn't seems to be working. I've tryied to change the /etc/X11/xorg.conf in order to allow module to be loaded but in that specific version of ubuntu there is no xorg.conf. So, in my opiniion pykelogger is NOT working on ubuntu 9.10 !!
Cross-platform UI libraries such as Tkinter or wxPython have API for keyboard events. Using these you could map «CTRL» + «#» to an action.
On linux, you might want to have a look at pykeylogger. For some strange reason, reading from /dev/input/.... doesn't always work when X is running. For example it doesn't work on ubuntu 8.10. Pykeylogger uses xlib, which works exactly when the other way doesn't. I'm still looking into this, so if you find a simpler way of doing this, please tell me.
Under Linux it's possible to do this quite easily with Xlib. See this page for details:
http://www.larsen-b.com/Article/184.html