Shell Programming and Scripting

What system are you on? My top doesn't have -q switch (running linux).
What does -q switch do?

Does the script run ok when you run it from CL (no cron)?

What exactly is your cron entry?
Try to redirect stdout and stderr of the script to a file for debugging. Also specify the MAILTO and SHELL variable in cron, eg.

Code:

MAILTO=<user>@domain.com
SHELL=/bin/ksh
15/* * * * * /usr/apps/client/bin/gatherOSKPI.sh >> /home/user/gather.log 2>> /home/user/gatherErr.log

And see whether you will capture anything interesting.

Next step would be to set the verbose mode on in the script:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
set -x
...

and/or simplify/comment out the lines to try to find the culprit.

mirni

We are running this on Solaris 2.10

The cron command is:
0,15,30,45 * * * * /usr/apps/client/bin/gatherOSKPI.sh

As I had it explained by the admin that was helping me, the -q flag remove delays when top refreshes, so I am guessing it can be removed. I don't use more than a single response from top in my script. I put it there because the admin recommended it.

I'll check on if i can make use of the mailto or verbose methods without interrupting their work. as I said, they are letting me stretch "if" I can learn on my own.

Marc

Are you sure your ps excerpt is correct and complete? I see process 26858 three times, but I am missing the grep command from that pipe. As the top process is hogging CPU time like mad, the -n1 switch seems not to work...
Suspicion: one of the (intermittend) processes that top shows in the first five lines has a character (combination) in it that prevents one of the commands in the pipe to finish and thus keeps the entire pipe open.
btw - that construct of 4 loooong pipes could (and should, for clarity, simplicity, maintainability) be reduced to one single top execution, piped to one single elaborate awk statement, either printing to those tmp files, or, feeding values to the desired variables immediately.

Rudi,

Actually, I cut the ps results down to what I thought was relevant

As for making the awk more efficient, I'm learning as I go here and not sure how I would combine all three items into one. But I know you're right and hope to learn better as I go.

As for the issue, we've cleaned up the script a bit on our end, killed off the lingering processes and the admin I'm dealing with found some environmental issues ( He was not specific ) and restarted the cronjob for this script. So we are in "watch mode" again as he says it may have been an unrelated OS issue after all.

So thank you all for your input, but it appears that my script may have only been to blame until the admins could find out what the real issue was.. :\

Thank you all for your help!

Marc

Just to set you on the right track: That repeated top | head 5 | grep CPU | awk | awk... could be reduced to a single top | awk 'NR> 5 {exit} /CPU/ { ... split (...) ...} /Memory/ { ... split(...) ...} etc.
Did you ever consider the vmstat command (if available on your system) that hands you out the desired info on a silver plate, and can run in intervals as desired?