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Is that even running?

February 20th, 2009 by masukomi

It’s not uncommon for me to wonder if some app is running on my linux box, and while I could pipe together ps and a couple greps it felt silly to keep doing it after a while. So, I applied my admittedly limited bash skills and came up with the following script which I throw that in an executable called “got”. Now I can just type “got tomcat?” (the question-mark is optional). If anything is running with “tomcat” in it’s command it’ll give me the skinny on it. Otherwise it’ll let me know it wasn’t found.

</p>
<p>#!/bin/bash<br />
APP=`echo $1 | sed s/?$//`<br />
RESULTS=`ps -A S| grep $APP | grep -v grep | grep -v &#8220;got $APP&#8221;`<br />
if [ "$RESULTS" != ""� ]; then<br />
echo $RESULTS<br />
else<br />
echo &#8220;No $APP found with ps -A S&#8221;<br />
fi</p>
<p>

If you can improve on this, please let me know.

5 Responses

Andy Mortimer writes:
February 20th, 2009 at 3:36 pm

There’s a neat trick I stumbled on somewhere which avoids the need for the second grep, and makes the raw commands a lot more pleasant to type. It takes advantage of a character class containing only one letter, but which breaks up the string so it doesn’t match itself:

ps -eaf | grep ‘[t]omcat’

(Use your favourite switches in place of -eaf). Because “[t]omcat” doesn’t contain the string “tomcat”, the grep command itself doesn’t match.
Jakub Nar?bski writes:
February 20th, 2009 at 7:19 pm

If you have it installed, you can use `pidof` (on my system at /sbin/pidof) to select process(es) by pid(s), instead of using pipeline of grep to filter output of ps. Or you can use ‘-C cmdlist’ option of ps.
Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
February 20th, 2009 at 8:35 pm

Jakub�s suggestions are good; personally I prefer pgrep, as in �pgrep tomcat�.
Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
February 20th, 2009 at 8:36 pm

(And then of course �alias got=pgrep�. ;-) )
Jakub Narebski writes:
February 20th, 2009 at 9:25 pm

pidof is part of Sys V init scripts;

pgrep is from procps (which you have probably installed for ‘top’ utility);

you have to match command name exactly (e.g. emacs-x for GNU Emacs in X Window) for “ps -C cmdlist”;