I have to do some task whenever some specific applications were launched. Is there any way to list all the processes running in an operating system or detect whenever a new process is created in operating system
Yeah, there is a bit of stuff in the standard Python library that Jython doesn't implement probably because it's platform dependent and too much work for the small Jython community to implement. Try looking for a Java solution, it's trivial to invoke Java code from Jython.
You could use psutil. Psutil provides information on running processes and system utilization.
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I have a kivy application in python which uses some threads.
As python is not able to run these threads on different Cores due to the Global Interpreter Lock, I would have liked to try to use PyPy for it and see if I can make the threads run faster of different cores since PyPy is different and offers stackless (what ever that is? :).
Does somebody have some information to share on how to make a simple python program, which launches some threads by the module threading, running with the pypy interpreter such that it uses this stackless feature?
Pypy won't resolve Python problems of running a single-thread each time, since it also makes use of the GIL - http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/faq.html#does-pypy-have-a-gil-why
Besides that, Kivy is a complex project embedding Python itself - although I don't know it very well, I doubt it is possible to switch the Python used in it for Pypy.
Depending on what you are doing, you may want to use the multiprocessing module instead of threading - it is a drop-in replacement that will make transparent inter-process calls to Python functions, and can therefore take advantage of multiple-cores.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html
This is standard in cPython and can likely be used from within Kivy, if (and only if) all code in the subprocess just take care of number-crunching, and so on, and all user interaction and display updates are made on the main process.
I need to send code to remote clients to be executed in them but security is a concern for me right now. I don't want unsafe code to be executed there so I would like to control what a program is doing. I mean for example, know if is making connections, where is connecting to, if is reading local files, etc. Is this possible with Python?
EDIT: I'm thinking in something similar to Android permission system. I want to know what a code will do and if it does something different, stop it.
You could use a different Python runtime:
if you run your script using Jython; you can exploit Java's permission system
with Pypy's sandboxed version you can choose what is allowed to run in your controller script
There used to be a module in Python called bastian, but that was deprecated as it wasn't that secure. There's also I believe something called RPython, but I don't know too much about that.
I would in this case use Pyro and write the code on the target server. That way you know clients can only execute written and tested code.
edit - it's probably worth noting that Pyro also supports http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_separation - although I've not had to use it for that.
I think you are looking for a sandboxed python. There used to be an effort to implement this, but it has been abolished a couple of years ago.
Sandboxed python in the python wiki offers a nice overview of possible options for your usecase.
The most rigourous (but probably the slowest) way is to run Python on a bare OS in an emulator.
Depending on the OS you use, there are several ways of running programs with restrictions, but without the overhead of an emulator:
FreeBSD has a nice integrated solution in the form of jails.
These grew out of the chroot system call.
Linux-VServer aims to do more or less the same on Linux.
In python, using twisted loopingcall, multiprocessing.Process, and multiprocessing.Queue; is it possible to create a zombie process. And, if so, then how?
A zombie is a process which has completed but whose completion has not yet been noticed by the process which started it. It's the Twisted process's responsibility to reap its children.
If you start the process with spawnProcess, everything should always work as expected. However, as described in bug #733 in Twisted (which has long been fixed), there are a plethora of nasty edge-cases when you want to use Twisted with other functions that spawn processes, as Python's API historically made it difficult to cooperate between signal handlers.
This is all fixed in recent versions of the code, but I believe you may still encounter this bug in the following conditions:
You are using a version of Twisted earlier than 10.1.
You are using a version of Python earlier than 2.6.
You are not building Twisted's native extension modules (if you're working from a development checkout or unpacked tarball rather than an installed version, you can fix this with python setup.py build_ext -i).
You are using a module like popen or subprocess.
Hopefully upgrading Twisted or running the appropriate command will fix your immediate issue, but you should still consider using spawnProcess, since that lets you treat process output as a normal event in the reactor event loop.
Is it possible to create an environment to safely run arbitrary Python scripts under Linux? Those scripts are supposed to be received from untrusted people and may be too large to check them manually.
A very brute-force solution is to create a virtual machine and restore its initial state after every launch of an untrusted script. (Too expensive.)
I wonder if it's possible to restrict Python from accessing the file system and interacting with other programs and so on.
Consider using a chroot jail. Not only is this very secure, well-supported and tested but it also applies to external applications you run from python.
There are 4 things you may try:
As you already mentioned, using a virtual machine or some other form of virtualisation (perhaps solaris zones are lightweight enough?). If the script breaks the OS there then you don't care.
Using chroot, which puts a shell session into a virtual root directory, separate from the main OS root directory.
Using systrace. Think of this as a firewall for system calls.
Using a "jail", which builds upon systrace, giving each jail it's own process table etc.
Systrace has been compromised recently, so be aware of that.
You could run jython and use the sandboxing mechanism from the JVM. The sandboxing in the JVM is very strong very well understood and more or less well documented. It will take some time to define exactly what you want to allow and what you dnt want to allow, but you should be able to get a very strong security from that ...
On the other side, jython is not 100% compatible with cPython ...
Try searching for "sandboxing python", e.g.:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/SandboxedPython
http://wiki.python.org/moin/How%20can%20I%20run%20an%20untrusted%20Python%20script%20safely%20(i.e.%20Sandbox)
could you not just run as a user which has no access to anything but the scripts in that directory?
I would like seek some guidance in writing a "process profiler" which runs in kernel mode. I am asking for a kernel mode profiler is because I run loads of applications and I do not want my profiler to be swapped out.
When I said "process profiler" I mean to something that would monitor resource usage by the process. including usage of threads and their statistics.
And I wish to write this in python. Point me to some modules or helpful resource.
Please provide me guidance/suggestion for doing it.
Thanks,
Edit::: Would like to add that currently my interest isto write only for linux. however after i built it i will have to support windows.
It's going to be very difficult to do the process monitoring part in Python, since the python interpreter doesn't run in the kernel.
I suspect there are two easy approaches to this:
use the /proc filesystem if you have one (you don't mention your OS)
Use dtrace if you have dtrace (again, without the OS, who knows.)
Okay, following up after the edit.
First, there's no way you're going to be able to write code that runs in the kernel, in python, and is portable between Linux and Windows. Or at least if you were to, it would be a hack that would live in glory forever.
That said, though, if your purpose is to process Python, there are a lot of Python tools available to get information from the Python interpreter at run time.
If instead your desire is to get process information from other processes in general, you're going to need to examine the options available to you in the various OS APIs. Linux has a /proc filesystem; that's a useful start. I suspect Windows has similar APIs, but I don't know them.
If you have to write kernel code, you'll almost certainly need to write it in C or C++.
don't try and get python running in kernel space!
You would be much better using an existing tool and getting it to spit out XML that can be sucked into Python. I wouldn't want to port the Python interpreter to kernel-mode (it sounds grim writing it).
The /proc option does sound good.
some code code that reads proc information to determine memory usage and such. Should get you going:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py reads memory information of processes using Python through /proc/smaps like charlie suggested.
Some of your comments on other answers suggest that you are a relatively inexperienced programmer. Therefore I would strongly suggest that you stay away from kernel programming, as it is very hard even for experienced programmers.
Why would you want to write something that
is a very complex system (just look at existing profiling infrastructures and how complex they are)
can not be done in python (I don't know any kernel that would allow execution of python in kernel mode)
already exists (oprofile on Linux)
have you looked at PSI? (http://www.psychofx.com/psi/)
"PSI is a Python module providing direct access to real-time system and process information. PSI is a Python C extension, providing the most efficient access to system information directly from system calls."
it might give you what you are looking for. .... or at least a starting point.
Edit 2014:
I'd recommend checking out psutil instead:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/psutil
psutil is actively maintained and has some nifty process monitoring features. PSI seems to be somewhat dead (last release 2009).