Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello all,

i wrote a shell script that was running perfectly fine until we had some issue with our NFS server and the script was hung.
This script runs every 20 mins and obviously as we had the NFS issue, the script start to hang. as i do a check to make sure
NFS directory is avaiable or not. Original check i had in place was below, now i am trying to modify so i can run this even
when NFS is done or atleast the script does not hang

Code:

  if [ -d /nfs/stage ]; then
    echo "NFS is avaiable,go to next steps"
  else
    echo "NFS is NOT avaiable"
    echo "NFS NOT Available |mailx -s "Backup failed ..." email@domain.com
    exit 1
  fi

with new modification....

Code:

   if [ `ls /nfs/stage|wc -l` -gt 0 & sleep 5; kill $! ]; then
    echo "NFS is avaiable"
  else
    echo "NFS is NOT avaiable"
  fi

But that does not seem to work. i was thinking to use the timeout command but i have to make this script work on linux and hp-ux and
i believe hp-ux dose not have the timeout command.

Any thoughts on how i can do a check without haning my script?

Moderator's Comments:

Please use code tags next time for your code and data. Thanks

which are server which are clients?
NFS can be very tricky on HP-UX... and so needs some tuning because some software (e.g. "non intrusive" secusrity scans can get you NFS server to almost freeze...)

clients are hp-ux and linux and same goes for server too(some NFS server are on HP-UX and some one linux)....

so thats why i need a script that work on both linux and HP-UX....

Ever considered using touch rather than ls?

any specific reason why touch is better than ls ? in this case

Code:

df /nfs/stage >/dev/null 2>&1 </dev/null &
sleep 5
if kill -0 $! 2>/dev/null
then
  echo "NFS is not available"
  kill -9 $!
  exit 1
fi
...

Is there a way to do the same thing without the KILL command?

as i do not have access to that....would something like below work??

Code:

df /oracle/stage >/dev/null 2>&1 </dev/null &
sleep 5
STATUS=`ps -ef|grep $$|wc -l`
if [ $STATUS -ge 1 ]; then
echo "alive"
else
echo "not alive"
fi