Using the awesome psutil library it's pretty simple:
p = psutil.Process(pid)
p.terminate() #or p.kill()
If you don't want to install a new library, you can use the os module:
import os
import signal
os.kill(pid, signal.SIGTERM) #or signal.SIGKILL
See also the os.kill documentation.
If you are interested in starting the command python StripCore.py if it is not running, and killing it otherwise, you can use psutil to do this reliably.
Something like:
import psutil
from subprocess import Popen
for process in psutil.process_iter():
if process.cmdline() == ['python', 'StripCore.py']:
print('Process found. Terminating it.')
process.terminate()
break
else:
print('Process not found: starting it.')
Popen(['python', 'StripCore.py'])
Sample run:
$python test_strip.py #test_strip.py contains the code above
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py
Process not found: starting it.
$killall python
$python test_strip.py
Process not found: starting it.
$python test_strip.py
Process found. Terminating it.
$python test_strip.py
Process not found: starting it.
Note: In previous psutil versions cmdline was an attribute instead of a method.