Shell Programming and Scripting

The OPs statement "as part of a bigger script" concerns me here.

Typically it is quite unlikley for a script process to use a large amount of CPU in it's own right. More than likley a child process of the script (like grep, find, mysql, etc) will actually consume the CPU.

Also note that using a large % of the CPU isn't a bad thing, if there is work to be done and free cycles available they should be used for the job. Consider using "nice" to give the process less priority or enforcing a maximum runtime rather than CPU watching.

I basically want to see if the process is idle if it is then perform an action.

Code:

ps -p $(pgrep 'xbmc\.bin') -o pcpu=

returns the cpu, not sure how to then see if that result is higher

Is this correct

Code:

if [ps -p $(pgrep 'xbmc\.bin') -o pcpu= | awk 'NR>1' ) -gt 12 ]
then

When I re run ps -p $(pgrep 'xbmc\.bin') -o pcpu= it seems to reutrn the same figure as before.

How about checking if process isn't in the running (R) state:

Code:

if [ $( ps -f $(pgrep 'xbmc\.bin') -o state= ) != "R" ]
then