I need a shell script to kill apache and restart it, in case the number of processes keeps growing. The logic is like the below, but I don't know how to get the number and neither the syntax. Could somebody kindly help?

if no_of_processes (ps ax ¦ grep httpd) > 200
then
killall httpd
apachectl start

I'm using Fedora Core3

if [ `ps -fu $USERNAME  | awk '/processname/ { x++ } END{print x}'` > 200 ]
then
 echo "exceeded"
 #do killall and restarting
fi

[[ $(ps -ax | grep httpd| wc -l) -gt 200 ]]&& { kill -9 $(ps -ax | grep httpd | awk '{ print $1; }'); apachectl start; }

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod...tml#maxclients

Cheers
ZB

kill -9???????????????????????????

killall httpd -------------> I assumed killing all the httpd processes...

killall ?????????????????????????

That's the first thing that comes to your mind?

Ever considered trying to stop something in a decent way instead of using kill as first option?