Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi There...
I have an application which starts up many different processes under different names and I'm creating a script to tell me which processes are running (approx 30 different processes). To do this, I parse the results of a ps -u $USER.
My question is, will my script be faster if I run this ps statement each time and parse it or if I run the ps just once, storing the contents into a file, and then parsing the contents of the file?

I don't need my script to give real time results (I will be running it only 3-4 times a day) so I just need to know which method is faster.

Also, while on this topic, is there any way I can check the speed of execution of my script?

Q1 - run ning the ps command one and then parsing a file is faster than re-running ps 20-30 times. If you only parse 2-3 times, it may be a wash, timewise

q2 -

Code:

time myfind_process.sh

The time utility shows you the times (wall clock, user cpu time, system cup time)
for a process.

perfect...thanks for the quick reply jim!