Check what a running process is doing: print stack trace of an uninstrumented Python program

Question

Is there a way on Linux to check what a running Python daemon process is doing? That is, without instrumenting the code and without terminating it? Preferably I\'d like to get t

Answer 1

on POSIX systems like Linux, you can use good old GDB, see

• https://t37.net/debug-a-running-python-process-without-printf.html and
• https://wiki.python.org/moin/DebuggingWithGdb

There's also the excellent PyCharm IDE (free community version available) that can attach to a running Python process right from within the IDE, using Pdb 4 under the hood, see this blog entry:

• http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2015/02/feature-spotlight-python-debugger-and-attach-to-process/