Shell Programming and Scripting

I have generated a script that will email a list of people if a certain PID is not running, using "mailx". I have the script running every 5 minutes as a cron job.

I want the script to stop sending an email, if the email has been sent 5 times (meaning PID is dead). I want this so that my inbox doesn't get full.

Do I implement a "for loop" or "counter" syntax in my script? If so, can someone help with the code.

Thanks. Cheers!

You can keep the count in a file whenever you send mail.

Thanks for the response. How would I implement this in a file

What you are doing is storing the counter number in a file call my_cntr. Every time the file is run, the counter is increased by one. This will handle your counter issue. You then just need to mix your other requirements in with this code section.
There are two echo's to the screen that you can remove; they are not essential to the program execution. They are the "#print to screen" lines.

Code:

#! /bin/bash
# to read a counter

if [ -s my_cntr ]
# counter file exists
   then
      last_val=$(cat my_cntr)
      echo "current: "$last_val  #print to screen
      next_val=$(($last_val + 1))
      echo "next: "$next_val   #print to screen
      echo "$next_val" >my_cntr
   else
      echo "1" >my_cntr
fi