Add process_is_alive() to client/bin/base_utils. Use a smart pgrep command which finds the python processes not found by plain pgrep. Signed-off-by: Duane Sand <[email protected]> git-svn-id: http://test.kernel.org/svn/autotest/trunk@3617 592f7852-d20e-0410-864c-8624ca9c26a4

diff --git a/client/bin/base_utils.py b/client/bin/base_utils.py
index d6099dc..c7a1a06 100755
--- a/client/bin/base_utils.py
+++ b/client/bin/base_utils.py

@@ -653,3 +653,13 @@
     utils.system("sync")
     # We ignore failures here as this will fail on 2.6.11 kernels.
     utils.system("echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches", ignore_status=True)
+
+
+def process_is_alive(name):
+    """
+    'pgrep name' misses all python processes and also long process names.
+    'pgrep -f name' gets all shell commands with name in args.
+    So look only for command whose first nonblank word ends with name.
+    """
+    return utils.system("pgrep -f '^[^ ]*%s\W'" % name,
+                        ignore_status=True) == 0