Conditional execution in bash
For some reason, I needed to run a program, but not if another program is running (can be the same program).
After googling for a bash tutorial, I was able to create the script:
ps aux > psinfo cat psinfo | grep FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM > programinfo if [ `wc -l < programinfo` = "0" ] then PROGRAM_TO_RUN fi
ps is used to list all processes running on the system. grep is used to display all occurences of the string FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM from the output of ps. The output of ps isn’t directly piped to grep, e.g “ps aux | grep FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM” because of the unpredictable behaviour of piping. Sometimes “grep FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM” is started before ps, making 1 entry of the string FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM in the output of ps if FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM is not running. However, sometimes grep is started after ps, which gives a count of 0 if FORBIDDEN_PROGRAM is not running.
wc is used to count the number of lines in a file (and is able to count other things too).
