How to get a list of active processes under Unix

[Bierny]

Hi All!
I am writting a small script that will find a parent pid and from this point find a parent of a parent in order to kill this last parent :-)

I know it sounds stange (at least ... ) but this is really what i have to do. So

When the script starts it find it's parent pid, like this

ppid = os.getppid()

Afterwards a list of active processes is fetched from a console command ps -Af as follows:

buffer = commands.getoutput("ps -Af")

and latter on using regular expression syntax i get a parrent process id of a ppid i have stored at the beginnig.

My question is, is there any "python" way to get a list of active processes? I mean not using "ps - Af" command.
It's not i don't want to do it this way, i am just curious :-)

Thanks in advance for any hints!

Best regards,