While loop condition 1

[kasparov]

I'm stuck with the definition of the condition in a while loop. What I want to do is loop until a certain process has started. I can't easily test this directly because it requires restarting the machine so I'm testing by watching for any process which is owned by a certain user (so when I login as that user the process begins & because I'm trying to use negation the loop should terminate). This is my test code:

while [ ! "ps -ef | grep [x]x" ]
do
        sleep 1
        echo NOT YET
done

echo STARTED

xx is a user - when I login as xx I expect the condition to evaluate to false so it should fall out of the loop.

But this always seems to return TRUE (so it never loops). I don't know if my loop is wrong, my negation syntax is wrong or if I'm just barking up the wrong tree & should try a completely different approach. Either way I just can't figure it out.

Any suggestions gratefully received as usual.

Chris

 

[feherke]

Hi

while ! ps -ef | grep '[x]x'
do
  sleep 1
  echo NOT YET
done

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[kasparov]

God bless Tek-Tips