How to check if the docker engine and a docker container are running?

Question

In a script, I need to check:

a) Is the docker engine running?
b) Given a container name, is that docker container running?

[the initial wording of this

Answer 1

You can also check if a particular docker container is running or not using following command:

docker inspect postgres | grep "Running"

This command will check if for example my postgres container is running or not and will return output as "Running": true

Hope this helps.