[ale] Need help from cammand line and scripting gurus

[Greg Sabino Mullane]

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Mea culpa. Made a mistake in my previous post. Should be "||" instead of "&&" 
because (presumably) we want to run the command if we do *not* get any 
matches. So it should be:

ps -Afl | grep mystartclass | grep -qv \
  "grep mystartclass" || StartUpJava

Some random thoughts:

The problem of sun not keeping the entire command-line is more problematic. 
The first thing is to check your local 'man ps' to see if it mentions 
anything about it. There may be a way to extract it. 

This output looks rather strange:
[snip] :00 /bin/../java/bin/../jre/bin/../bin/sparc/native_threads/java
- -Dbeanfactory.cfg=

What's with all the double dot obfuscation? Isn't it simply
/java/jre/sparc/native_threads/java?

Can you have that program cd to the above directory and then call 
the java executable? That alone may solve the problem, as the 
output would then be:
[snip] :00 java -Dbeanfactory.cfg=

Another suggestion: start the program in a simple shell wrapper with a 
unique name:

cat > MyJavaProgram
#!/bin/sh
/java/jre/sparc/native_threads/java -Dbeanfactory.cfg=

chmod 700 MyJavaProgram

You could then grep for "MyJavaProgram" and either trust that info 
alone, or match the PID and PPID to find the actual java program.

Finally, if you have control of the starting process, a better way would be to 
have it store its own PID somewhere, such as the somewhat standard 
/var/run directory as something like "/var/run/myJavaApp.pid" Try to 
have the java program create the file when invoked and remove it when it 
dies. Your script would then look something like this:

test -f /var/run/myJavaApp.pid && \
  ps -Af | egrep -q "^tmazukna +`cat /var/run/myJavaApp.pid` " \
  || StartUpJava


One of those four ways above should work. Hopefully. :)

Greg Sabino Mullane  greg at turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200202271310

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