Checking if process still running?

Question

As a way to build a poor-man\'s watchdog and make sure an application is restarted in case it crashes (until I figure out why), I need to write a PHP CLI script that will be

Answer 1

I'd use pgrep to do this (caution, untested code):

exec("pgrep lighttpd", $pids);
if(empty($pids)) {

    // lighttpd is not running!
}

I have a bash script that does something similar (but with SSH tunnels):

#!/bin/sh

MYSQL_TUNNEL="ssh -f -N -L 33060:127.0.0.1:3306 tunnel@db"
RSYNC_TUNNEL="ssh -f -N -L 8730:127.0.0.1:873 tunnel@db"

# MYSQL
if [ -z `pgrep -f -x "$MYSQL_TUNNEL"` ] 
then
    echo Creating tunnel for MySQL.
    $MYSQL_TUNNEL
fi

# RSYNC
if [ -z `pgrep -f -x "$RSYNC_TUNNEL"` ]
then
    echo Creating tunnel for rsync.
    $RSYNC_TUNNEL
fi

You could alter this script with the commands that you want to monitor.