Hi
I want to check whether specific process is running or not through a shell script.
ps -ef | grep will tell me this, i tried this way in shell

cnt =`ps -ef| grep xyz | awk '{ END {print NR}}`

if it return two rows, job is running else not.

Is there any better way of doing this.

How about using grep twice over? If you wanted to check if inetd was running, you could use:
This will print out the number of running instances of the process that you are checking for.

Why two rows ?
Try this

I don't think that the OP means that s/he is searching for two processes. The output of a 'ps -ef |grep ...' often throws up the process for grep as well. So the count is two...