go-ps is a library for Go that implements OS-specific APIs to list and manipulate processes in a platform-safe way. The library can find and list processes on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows.

If you're new to Go, this library has a good amount of advanced Go educational value as well. It uses some advanced features of Go: build tags, accessing DLL methods for Windows, cgo for Darwin, etc.

How it works:

• Darwin uses the sysctl syscall to retrieve the process table.
• Unix uses the procfs at /proc to inspect the process tree.
• Windows uses the Windows API, and methods such as CreateToolhelp32Snapshot to get a point-in-time snapshot of the process table.

Install using standard go get:

$ go get github.com/mitchellh/go-ps
...

import ( ps "github.com/mitchellh/go-ps" ... // other imports here... )

func whatever(){
    processList, err := ps.Processes()
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("ps.Processes() Failed, are you using windows?")
        return
    }

    // map ages
    for x := range processList {
        var process ps.Process
        process = processList[x]
        log.Printf("%d\t%s\n",process.Pid(),process.Executable())

        // do os.* stuff on the pid
    }
}