Shell Programming and Scripting

Appreciate all your inputs but I am a newbie and a lot of what is suggested is arcane to me. Trying hard to make sense of it and testing it out. Will keep you posted with my final outcome/solution.

Back to previous simple solution, yes there was a glitch. Sorry about that. wc prints the file name, which I forgot. Here is correct version. Try this, see if it works:

Code:

while sleep 10; do
  grep STARTUP nohup.out > temp.x
  lines=`cat temp.x | wc -l`
  if [ $lines -gt 1 ]; then
    echo STARTUP occured twice in nohup.out
    # Do whatever needs doing
  fi
done

I believe the $? of grep tells you if it found any. Some grep's have -q for quiet, as $? is the answer. grep -c will give you the line count without the file or wc.

In place of nohup,out, you could have a log for each run appname.YYYY-MM-DD_HH:MM:SS that tells you the start time. Two startups would be two files unless they started the same second (can add .$$ to the end for that!) Each file being the product on one run makes thing easier to understand. The default nohup.out is nice for little adhoc things, and oversights, but normally "(...) >logname 2>&1" keeps nohup.out empty and every command in the parens uses that log unless it redirects to another. In a big shop, it is nice to have a shared log for start and end or abort lines and separate logs for each run, separate dirs for each app.

Thanks hanson. That worked! Simple solution & does the job!

You can accomplish that more efficiently by simply redirecting standard input.

Code:

wc -l < temp.x

Regards,
Alister

Code:

while sleep 10
do
  if [ "" != "$( sed '
                    1,/STARTUP/d
                    /STARTUP/!d
                    q
                   ' nohup.out
                )" ] # stops reading at any second STARTUP (file may go on much farther)
  then
    echo STARTUP occurs twice in nohup.out
    # Do whatever needs doing
  fi
done