Hello shmem and thank you very much for answering.

I'm sorry if my question was too imprecise. This issue has a serious background and is not just for fun. On a Pentaho server some java processes run forever, consume all memory, bring load average up to 500 and then kill the machine.

This These processes are triggered by cron which triggers a shell script that triggers another shell script that triggers the java process.

No one had any idea yet why the processes run amok.

My task is: The processes have to be monitored. At least pids, time and cmndline have to be written to a logfile. A mail has to be send to the admin of the machine. If the cputime exeeds some value, the processes have to be killed. (N.B.: Nagios is not an option).

"Do we want to build a tree?"

Yes, we really should do that ;-)

I think, the solution provided below by kcott at Re: Better way to search in the process table? does what i need and is much better than my example.

Update: I tried to fix my Denglisch ;-)

Best regards, Karl