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).
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;
}