If I'm totally off on that, can someone point me into the direction I need to go in to check for when something WON'T be there?

You're not totally off. You're looking right at it. If the process doesn't exist, you'll get nothing on standard output. Here's why. 

  while ( my $proc = <PROCS> ) {
      # if the grep filters out everything, this is a
      # zero-trip loop.
  }

[download]
You might have better luck with something like 
  my $found_one = 0;
  while ( my $proc = <PROCS> ) {
      ...
      $found_one = 1;
  }
  if ( $found_one ) {
      print "looks okay here\n";
  } else {
      print "couldn't find $process\n";
  }

[download]
Note also that you could do both of the greps in Perl, rather than launching additional external processes.

In reply to Re: undefined question by dws
in thread undefined question by Anonymous Monk

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