How to check screen is running?

Question

How to check in Python whether the screen with the given name. For example, check if server1 is running?

Thanks : )

Answer 1

The built in command for finding current screen sessions is screen -ls

To get the same functionality in python:

from subprocess import check_output

def screen_present(name):
        var = check_output(["screen -ls; true"],shell=True)
        if "."+name+"\t(" in var:
                print name+" is running"
        else:
                print name+" is not running"

screen_present("server1")

A couple of comments on the code:

• I had to use ; true and shell=True because screen returns a exit code of 1, which doesn't play well with the check_output function.
• Also, I added the "."+ and +\t( to make sure that we were matching the screen name and not another part of the printout.

Answer 2

you could use subprocess and pgrep:

import subprocess

p = subprocess.check_output(['pgrep', '-f', 'screen'])
print p