UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Gurus,

I have two processes running on a Unix box, named say, PRCS1 and PRCS1X.

I want to check whether process PRCS1 is running or not, and depending on that I have to make further decisions while writing a shell script.

I am using: ps -eaf|grep PRCS1|grep -v grep

But the problem is the above command returns the process details of PRCS1X as well, even when the process PRCS1 is not up and running.

I wanted to look-up for the exact process-name PRCS1; nothing more or less. I also tried: ps -eaf|grep "PRCS1"|grep -v grep .... plz forgive my ignorance, I'm not a Guru in Unix.

Can anyone suggest a better way to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance,
Sagar

Code:

ps aux | egrep 'PRCS1[^X]' | grep -v grep
ps aux | egrep 'PRCS1X' | grep -v grep

Though it may be way more elegant to try to identify them based on pids. Do they generate pid files under /var/run ? You could just check for the existence of files, then the existence of /proc/pid-number where pid-number is the contents of the pid file.

Try using "ps -ef | grep -w <whatever>"

grep -w searches for the exact "word" you specify.