monitoring bogus(invalid) processes

[icu812]

I have an intermittent problem whereby a process respawns itself and causes the system to lock up. Can someone please tell me how to monitor this process in a ksh script. I'm thinking I could use ps -ef|grep <processname>|wc -l. If the number returned by this command exceeds 175 I want to be paged. How can I write a korn shell script to accomplish this?????? Thanks in advance

 

[bjverzal]

num=`ps -ef | grep [processname]|grep -v grep |wc -l|awk {'print $1'}`
if [ &quot;$num&quot; -ge &quot;175&quot; ] ; then
page you however you do that
fi

 

[gileb]

hmmm
why do you awk the wc -l ?
and btw its awk '{ ....}' not awk {' ... '}

no ?

 

[bjverzal]

The &quot;awk&quot; removes the leading spaces, and the {''} combination works either way under 4.3.3.

/home/OPERATOR/bin> ls -la |wc -l|awk {'print $1'}
19
/home/OPERATOR/bin> ls -la |wc -l|awk '{print $1}'
19

Bill

 

[gileb]

shame on me !

 

[aixmurderer]

Instead of using this:
num=`ps -ef | grep sendmail|grep -v grep |wc -l|awk {'print $1'}

I found this would do the same for me:

num=`ps -ef | grep endmail|wc -l`


Or am I missing something else here?