Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello every body...
I've writen a ksh script to start a server.
How may I get the PID of the process-server
to be sure that the server is really started.
think you all

Maybe something like this:

Code:

[...]
(ps -ef | grep [p]rocessname >/dev/null 2>&1) && echo "OK" || echo "Not OK"
[...]

The [] around the letter in your processname process will keep grep from matching itself in the process list. It could also be written:
... | grep processname | grep -v grep ...
The ">/dev/null 2>&1" makes sure there is no output.
The && tells the shell that if the previous command was successful, then do the next thing (echo OK). The || says, if the previous command was not successful (returned not-equal to 0), then do the command after that (echo Not OK).
I put ( ) around the first part for readablility. I'm not sure if you need it.
It could also be formatted to be a little easier to read:

Code:

[...]
(ps -ef | grep [p]rocessname >/dev/null 2>&1) \
                                && echo "OK" \
                                || echo "Not OK"
[...]

There's probably dozens of ways to do this, but this is how I would do it.