Multiple invocations of powertop

[Alan Jenkins]

Does the kernel interface make it possible to detect if another 
instance of powertop is running?

Just they don't exactly co-operate; a number of times I've run 
powertop and seen ridiculously low wakeups/s, and found out that it's 
because there's a second instance of powertop which had carried on 
running after I closed it's terminal window.  I assume the not-dying 
bit is an artefact of running powertop as root in a non-root terminal 
emulator, but it would be nice if there was a reliable way to detect this.

If not it sounds like a defect in the kernel interface.

Alan