Hi,

I am writing a shell script to invoke a C++ program. Before I start the C++ program (oi7loadbalancer), I am checking if the process is already running. I start the process only if it is not already running. I have the following check in my script.

proccount=`ps -f -u $USER_NAME | grep "oi7loadbalancer" | grep -v "grep" | wc -l`

If proccount is equal to zero, i will start the process and otherwise not. It is working fine in most cases. But in some cases, when multiple instances of the script are invoked, they do the checking at the same time and both the scripts call the C++ program.

I want to prevent this. Please help me.

I also tried to add a sleep of 2 seconds before this check. But that also did not help. Can i use $RANDOM value as parameter to the sleep command? will this $RANDOM also return the same number to both the instances of the script, when invoked at exactly the same time? Also, i want the sleep time to be a random number between 0 and 5. how can i do this.

Thanks in advance.
Sim