Re: How best to see if syslogd is running?

Don't mess with grepping, or even running ps. Get the pid, and kill 0, $pid; it to see if it's alive. If you must run ps, don't grep, but call it like ps h 1234 where 1234 is the pid wanted, and see if it outputs anything or even its exit status.

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Re^2: How best to see if syslogd is running? by Fletch (Bishop) on Jan 03, 2005 at 21:33 UTC
Not that this isn't a good suggestion, but be careful as `ps` usage and arguments can vary greatly between OSen (and sometimes even between releases of the same OS :). While the example given works fine on Linux, on all three of OS X, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD it'll still print a header line even when given a single pid (the `-h` means "print headers every page of output" according to the man page, although it doesn't seem to do anything different that I can tell . . .). I won't even get into SysV-esque `ps` . . . Update: Reworded to make more clear that it's the BSD-y ones that insist on a header.	[reply]

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Re^2: How best to see if syslogd is running?
by Fletch (Bishop) on Jan 03, 2005 at 21:33 UTC

Not that this isn't a good suggestion, but be careful as ps usage and arguments can vary greatly between OSen (and sometimes even between releases of the same OS :). While the example given works fine on Linux, on all three of OS X, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD it'll still print a header line even when given a single pid (the -h means "print headers every page of output" according to the man page, although it doesn't seem to do anything different that I can tell . . .).

I won't even get into SysV-esque ps . . .

Update: Reworded to make more clear that it's the BSD-y ones that insist on a header.

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