Hello, I'd like to programatically get a list of the running processes on my system. I wouldn't like the approach of running "ps" with some parameters and then parse the output. I'm developing a Java application to monitor some things, and one of them is the running processes on the system, and I intend to use JNI to get them. On windows I have some C++ code which does the trick, but I really didn't find any example of code to do this on linux. If you have any suggestions about any programming language they are welcome. Thank you.

You could download the source of ps and see how that program does it.

try ls /proc compare folder names with the output of ps and you can see that each pid has a folder named pid with more info inside. I have seen a good explanation of this and other system programming stuff in the book "advanced programming in the unix environment"

You do have a point

Does this actually work on any distribution?

Not all OS :

Oka... thank you guys.

Have a look at a busybox' implementation of ps based on proc. There's even a function called procps_scan (./libbb/procps.c). That should save you a lot of time.