How do you find out if sendmail is running?

[daniel1965]

I need to be able to check if sendmail is running on a Linux server.

I was just going to get the pid from the /var/run/sendmail.pid file and then see if a process with that value was actually running (via ps & grep).

But the problem I have is that the sendmail.pid file is owned by root (with 600 permissions) and the user from which I need to do the check is NOT root!

I was thinking of just changing the permissions to something like 644 but am thinking this may cause problems(??).

Does anyone know of another way I can check if sendmail is running without having to refer to the pid file? I guess I can just use ps & grep but there seem to be a lot of processes listed that relate to sendmail and, without a known pid, I am not sure which of these I should be checking for!

 

[BitFuzzy]

ps -ax | grep sendmail

 

[sylter]

If you have the process service you can check in this way

Service sendmail status

and you can start, restart, or stop in the same way

Juanjo.