Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, what I want to do is get the SIZE of a particular process from top into a shell script so I can put it in a while loop. I want to display a warning message when the process size gets up to a certain amount, but I don't know how to get that one line spit out from Top and thrown into my shell script. I tried ps -ey but it says it doesn't support the "y". I tried ps -el but the SZ I get back does not match what the TOP command says for SIZE.
Can anybody help? Thanks so much
Amy

Try this

top -b > $filename
grep -i $process_name $filename | awk '{print $6 }'

jus see if u get right column...

Thanks RishiPahuja, but when I try top -b it says "top: illegal option --b"
I am on an HP UX machine using a ksh
uname -a shows HP-UX b.11.11

Thanks for your help, any other suggestions? I thought maybe top -d 1 > /tmp/file, then cat /tmp/file | grep process_name | awk but that seems like it takes too long.

Code:

NAME=blah #assume only 1 of these?
THRES=1234 #KB

while true; do
    SIZE=`ps -C $NAME -o rss=`
    if [ "$SIZE" -gt "$THRES" ]; then
        echo "Warning: $NAME is using more that $THRES RAM"
    fi
done

try top -f. This will write the output of top to a file. You can get the content from file and process it later

Thanks so much SSSOW and Pixelbeat and Rish....

I ended up using top -f and output to file. Then grepped and awked at the file until I got what I wanted.