How to check if another instance of my shell script is running

Question

GNU bash, version 1.14.7(1)

I have a script is called \"abc.sh\" I have to check this from abc.sh script only... inside it I have written f

Answer 1

I have found that using backticks to capture command output into a variable, adversly, yeilds one too many ps aux results, e.g. for a single running instance of abc.sh:

ps aux | grep -w "abc.sh" | grep -v grep | wc -l

returns "1". However,

count=`ps aux | grep -w "abc.sh" | grep -v grep | wc -l`
echo $count

returns "2"

Seems like using the backtick construction somehow temporarily creates another process. Could be the reason why the topicstarter could not make this work. Just need to decrement the $count var.