windows code to detect if a process is still alive

[Martin Pool]

On 14 April 2011 17:22, Voelker, Bernhard
<bernhard.voelker at siemens-enterprise.com> wrote:
> Martin Pool wrote:
>
>> For detection of stale lock files, I want to detect whether a given
>> process id on the local machine still corresponds to a live process.
>> On unix, kill(pid, 0) will do this.  What's the best way to do this
>> from inside Python on Windows?
>
> I don't know too much about Python, but as (C code) fopen("file", "w") locks
> a file for others automatically on Windows, doesn't Python just use
> that internally for locking?

Good question.  The files we're talking about are not necessarily
local.  Someone might open a repository over sftp and lose their
connection, and then want to do something else to the same branch from
the same client machine.  In fact, this is a good case of when stale
locks can be left behind, because if the connection drops over sftp
there is no possibility for the client to release its lock.

Martin