The script you wrote is very similar to mine, isnt'it?

Yep, I lost a closing quote. Typo.

It is similar to the original script you posted, except that instead of piping the line count to "read", I just assign it directly to a variable -- this is a cleaner and more direct method of doing it. I also eliminated the
"grep -v grep" with a little shell trickery -- the [s]quare brackets on the first letter of the script name. Its a personal preference, but I like this method better.

Thanks for your reply, but I have tested your code and my code 100 times (with a "for" writing to a log) and your code has failed 74 times and my code 63.

My question is why fails it?



Thanks in advance.

I recommend saving the output of your ps command (without the 'wc -l') to a log file so that you can see why it is failing.