in reply to Re: Unwanted instances of perl script
in thread Unwanted instances of perl script

grep myperlscript will always output the PID of the grep process. If you're already running Linux, I recommend looking at Highlander - allow only one invocation at a time of an expensive CGI script, which should give you an idea of how to limit a script to at most one instance.

Alternatively, use grep [m]yperlscript, which is a command line that will not match itself.