How to detect whether a process is running, on Linux, in the manner of 'pidof'?

[Nicholas Joll <nicholasjoll@...>]

Dear all

    I am told by the maintainers of the 'luaposix' module that, when running on Linux, lua can detect whether a process of a given name is running, in the manner of the Linux utility `pidof`. Yet, lua itself does not provide that capability (to my knowledge). Neither (I am told) does the luaposix module. I can call the Gnu-Linux utility `pidof` from lua but so doing is computationally slightly expensive and thus unsuited for my use case. Any advice, please? Thanks.

NJ