is_running() always return true on process created by psutil.Popen

[JasonXJ]

is_running() always returns true on a process created by psutil.Popen(), even after the process is already dead.

This is the code I ran on ipython. At command [79], pgrep already confirmed that the process was not there, but at [80], is_running() returned true.

In [77]: p = psutil.Popen('sleep  5', shell=True)

In [78]: !pgrep -af 'sleep 5'
22725 sleep 5

In [79]: !pgrep -af 'sleep 5'

In [80]: p.is_running()
Out[80]: True

This is some version information:

In [92]: psutil.__version__
Out[92]: '5.2.1'

In [93]: !lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS
Release:        16.04
Codename:       xenial

In [94]: import sys; sys.version
Out[94]: '3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23) \n[GCC 5.4.0 20160609]'

[giampaolo]

That's correct as the real process is not "sleep", it's the shell ("sh"), which is still alive as a zombie, and zombies are technically still running and querable:

>>> p = psutil.Popen('sleep  5', shell=True)
>>> # wait 5 secs
>>> p.name()
'sh'
>>> p.status()
'zombie'
>>> p.pid
20504
>>> 20504 in psutil.pids()
True

~/svn/cpython/Lib/asyncio$ ps aux | grep 20504
giampao+ 20504  0.0  0.0      0     0 pts/17   Z+   12:54   0:00 [sh] <defunct>

[nate-jackson]

Is there a way to tell if it's a zombie when using process_iter and oneshot()?

for proc in psutil.process_iter():
    with proc.oneshot():
        is_zombie = ?

[nate-jackson]

found it
proc.status() == 'zombie'