Determine programmatically if a program is running

In C, how can I find out programmatically if a process is already running on Linux/Ubuntu to avoid having it start twice? I’m looking for something similar to pidof.

Answer

You can walk the pid entries in /proc and check for your process in either the cmdline file or perform a readlink on the exe link (The following uses the first method).

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <dirent.h>
#include <sys/types.h>

pid_t proc_find(const char* name) 
{
    DIR* dir;
    struct dirent* ent;
    char* endptr;
    char buf[512];

    if (!(dir = opendir("/proc"))) {
        perror("can't open /proc");
        return -1;
    }

    while((ent = readdir(dir)) != NULL) {
        /* if endptr is not a null character, the directory is not
         * entirely numeric, so ignore it */
        long lpid = strtol(ent->d_name, &endptr, 10);
        if (*endptr != '') {
            continue;
        }

        /* try to open the cmdline file */
        snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "/proc/%ld/cmdline", lpid);
        FILE* fp = fopen(buf, "r");

        if (fp) {
            if (fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), fp) != NULL) {
                /* check the first token in the file, the program name */
                char* first = strtok(buf, " ");
                if (!strcmp(first, name)) {
                    fclose(fp);
                    closedir(dir);
                    return (pid_t)lpid;
                }
            }
            fclose(fp);
        }

    }

    closedir(dir);
    return -1;
}


int main(int argc, char* argv[]) 
{
    if (argc == 1) {
        fprintf("usage: %s name1 name2 ...n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }

    int i;
    for(int i = 1; i < argc; ++i) {
        pid_t pid = proc_find(argv[i]);
        if (pid == -1) {
            printf("%s: not foundn", argv[i]);
        } else {
            printf("%s: %dn", argv[i], pid);
        }
    }

    return 0;
}