Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All,
I have a need for a script which will look at the number of processes running on the server and decides whether to run its next command or not.

Eg: autosys starts abc.sh after watching for a file abc_start
abc.sh will remove the abc_start file from the server calls a stored procedure using sqlplus.
then it sleeps for 5 minutes
then it needs to evaluate if the max number of processes is reached (lets say it is 5)
if processes count is < 5 then it will touch abc_start and exits.

Any help will be greatly appreciated
Thanks

See if this'll work for you or not:

Code:

rm abc_start
<call procedure>
sleep 300
totproc=`ps -e | wc -l`
if [[ $totproc < 5 ]]; then
  touch abc_start
fi

Thank you for your response. It looks like our requirement is more complex that what I have explained earlier.

What we would like to do is to run only a certain number of our processes at any given time.
currently what we have is:
Our shell scripts will invoke sqlplus run a procedure and after its completion sleep for 5 minutes before creating a file and exiting the program. Once the file is created autosys filewatcher will run the same script.

what we would like to see is: I will try to explain it using an example: # of process limit is 5
EG: Assuming there are 5 processes running now 1,2,3,4,5
process 6 wakes from sleep and would like to run but it has to check how many processes are running (in our case 5) so there is no room for this one at this time. This process should go into a queue and wait for one of the process to complete.
Basically first come first served approach.

Help greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Hi ssikhar,

I have (100% ) similar requirement. Could you let me know if you found any solution for this.

thanks
Chandu

Could someone respond to the above problem. Response would be gr8ly appreciated!

thanks
Chandu

Let each process maintain a file which contains its PID.
So , if we have 5 processes are runing then we do have 5 PID files.

Let each process remove its PID file when it is completed/done.

The script should continually check whether 5 PID files exist. 5 PID files exist mean all 5 processes are running.

The script which is checking these 5 PID files periodically (sleep and wake )
, will start 6th process if one of the PID files is absent.

6th process also writes a PID file while it is starting.

You can repeat the same thing ... based on your requirement what you want to do afterwards.

chanduhyd4u, please read the rules if you haven't yet done so. Bumping posts to try and gain a quicker response is not permitted. And just 5 minutes after posting the first request?!

Thanks
ZB