Confirm if Python script process is running

Question

I want to check if a specific Python script is running. The script is "EXIF_GUI_EXPERIMENT.py". Running the script below returns nothing.

If I run ps -fA in the terminal I see the script is running as process "python3 /home/pi/scripts/tkinter/EXIF/EXIF_GUI_EXPERIMENT.py. What is the best way to see if this script is running?

#!/usr/bin/python3\

import subprocess

cmd = ["ps -fA | pgrep "EXIF_GUI_EXPERIMENT.py""]

result = subprocess.run(cmd, capture_output=True, text=True, shell=True)

print (result)

Answer 1

There's too many nested double quotation marks (") that give an error.

Something like this should work:

import subprocess

cmd = ['pgrep', '-f', 'EXIF_GUI_EXPERIMENT.py']

result = subprocess.run(cmd, capture_output=True, text=True)

if result.stdout:
    print(f"Process is running: {result.stdout}")
else:
    print("Process is not running")
    

(option -f in pgrep matches against full argument lists. The default is to match against process names.)

EDIT: following the suggestion in the comment, removed shell=True that's in general not needed and not only it might pose a security risk, but it can also impact performance because of the extra shell process, and limit portability as the default shell might be different on different operating systems