How to find whether a process is running on Windows/Linux

Question

I want my program to be able to detect whether OBS-Studio is currently running, and if it is, perform certain functionality in my program. The problem is I can't seem to find a solution that will work on both platforms. I've found things that use taskList, wmic.exe and others on windows, and I've found things using top, ps aux and others on linux, however these are very platform specific, and not easily ported. Is there a universal use case, and if so, what might it be?

I'm aware of ProcessHandle in Java9+, however my program runs Java8, with no current hope of upgrading, so that's not possible.

As far as I know, in java 8 there is no API for listing all the OS processes. I suggest using the java System property to discover the the host OS and then launch the command for that OS which lists the processes. — Abra, Aug 31 '19 at 20:10
[How do I programmatically determine operating system in Java?](https://stackoverflow.com/q/228477/5221149) — Andreas, Aug 31 '19 at 20:38

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 01 '19 at 03:33

I Cannot think of a solution that will work on both platforms, maybe use something like below to determine the operating system in Java then from there, use a conditional statement to execute the portion of the code appropriate for your host machine.

os = System.getProperty("os.name");

I hope this helps

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 09 '19 at 21:44

I ended up creating a method that would return a Map<Integer, String> for all processes by running os-specific commands:

public Map<Integer, String> getProcesses() {
    final Map<Integer, String> processes = Maps.newHashMap();
    final boolean windows = System.getProperty("os.name").contains("Windows");
    try {
        final Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(windows ? "tasklist /fo csv /nh" : "ps -e");
        try (final BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(process.getInputStream()))) {
            reader.lines().skip(1).forEach(x -> { // the first line is usually just a line to explain the format
                if (windows) {
                    // "name","id","type","priority","memory?"
                    final String[] split = x.replace("\"", "").split(",");
                    processes.put(Integer.valueOf(split[1]), split[0]);
                }
                else {
                    // id tty time command
                    final String[] split = Arrays.stream(x.trim().split(" ")).map(String::trim)
                            .filter(s -> !s.isEmpty()).toArray(String[]::new); // yikes
                    processes.put(Integer.valueOf(split[0]), split[split.length - 1]);
                }
            });
        }
    }
    catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return processes;
}

This hasn't been tested on Windows, but it should work. It also hasn't been tested on literally anything else other than Linux, but I hope this serves as a helpful method for others to work off of.

How to find whether a process is running on Windows/Linux

2 Answers2