Linux Script to check if process is running and act on the result

Question

I have a process that fails regularly & sometimes starts duplicate instances..

When I run: ps x |grep -v grep |grep -c \"processname\" I will get: <

Answer 1

If you changed awk '{print $1}' to '{ $1=""; print $0}' you will get all processes except for the first as a result. It will start with the field separator (a space generally) but I don't recall killall caring. So:

#! /bin/bash

logfile="/var/oscamlog/oscam1check.log"

case "$(pidof oscam1 | wc -w)" in

0)  echo "oscam1 not running, restarting oscam1:     $(date)" >> $logfile
    /usr/local/bin/oscam1 -b -c /usr/local/etc/oscam1 -t /usr/local/tmp.oscam1 &
    ;;
2)  echo "oscam1 running, all OK:     $(date)" >> $logfile
    ;;
*)  echo "multiple instances of oscam1 running. Stopping & restarting oscam1:     $(date)" >> $logfile
    kill $(pidof oscam1 | awk '{ $1=""; print $0}')
    ;;
esac

It is worth noting that the pidof route seems to work fine for commands that have no spaces, but you would probably want to go back to a ps-based string if you were looking for, say, a python script named myscript that showed up under ps like

root 22415 54.0 0.4 89116 79076 pts/1 S 16:40 0:00 /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/myscript

Just an FYI