Getting pid and details for topmost window

user247991 picture user247991 · Jan 11, 2010 · Viewed 17.9k times · Source

Does anyone know how to get the PID of the top active window and then how to get the properties of the window using the PID? I mean properties like process name, program name, etc.

I'm using Qt under Linux (Ubuntu 9.10).

Answer

Michel Gokan Khan picture Michel Gokan Khan · Jan 12, 2010

there is a command in linux call xprop which is a utility for displaying window properties in an X server. In linux xprop -root gives you the root windows properties and also other active programs. then you can get the ID of the active window using this command:

xprop -root | grep _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\)

to get just the active window ID ( without "_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW): window id # " in the beginning of the line ) use this command:

xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\)/{print $NF}'

now you can save this command output in a user defined variable:

myid=xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\)/{print $NF}'

xprop have an attribute call -id. This argument allows the user to select window id on the command line. We should look for _NET_WM_PID(CARDINAL) in output ... so we use this command:

xprop -id $myid | awk '/_NET_WM_PID\(CARDINAL\)/{print $NF}'

this gives you the topmost active window process ID.

to be more trickey and do all things in just 1 command ... :

 xprop -id $(xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\(WINDOW\)/{print $NF}') | awk '/_NET_WM_PID\(CARDINAL\)/{print $NF}'

Now I can run these commands via my C++ program ( in linux ) using popen function, grab stdout and print or save it. popen creates a pipe so we can read the output of the program we are invoking.

( you can also use '/proc' file system and get more detail of a PID ('/proc/YOUR_PID/status') )

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <stdio.h>
using namespace std;

inline std::string exec(char* cmd) {
    FILE* pipe = popen(cmd, "r");
    if (!pipe) return "ERROR";
    char buffer[128];
    std::string result = "";
    while(!feof(pipe)) {
        if(fgets(buffer, 128, pipe) != NULL)
                result += buffer;
    }
    pclose(pipe);
    return result;
}

int main()
{
    //we uses \\ instead of \ ( \ is a escape character ) in this string
 cout << exec("xprop -id $(xprop -root | awk '/_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW\\(WINDOW\\)/{print $NF}') | awk '/_NET_WM_PID\\(CARDINAL\\)/{print $NF}'").c_str(); 
 return 0;
}