Test if program is ever running (not sleeping) over a time period?

[Bodsda]

Assuming the output is delivered line by line, you can pipe to awk to get just the first column

command | awk '{print $1}'

Store the output, or run your comparison directly against that in the if clause.

Bodsda

[Habitual]

interactive mode is cool, but turn on collection for the I/O

http://collectl.sourceforge.net/ProcessIOStats.html

[Merrattic]

Hmmmm finding collectl too complicated to get to the info I want and to script it all in. Also running mplayer in a loop is causing script std output to break through the image on the terminal (despite my efforts to silence terminal output with "> /dev/null 2>&1" and other such switches)

Will perhaps look at a crontab job which simply restarts every hour or so, and put up with a blank screen for a minute or so (image random renaming mostly)

Thanks for all the help though, and collectl is a cool cli tool

[Habitual]

Hmmmm finding collectl too complicated to get to the info I want and to script it all in. Also running mplayer in a loop is causing script std output to break through the image on the terminal (despite my efforts to silence terminal output with "> /dev/null 2>&1" and other such switches)

Will perhaps look at a crontab job which simply restarts every hour or so, and put up with a blank screen for a minute or so (image random renaming mostly)

Thanks for all the help though, and collectl is a cool cli tool

You are correct, whatever you seem to be doing with "mplayer in loops" and redirects, AND cron won't be solved by using collectl.
But I'm certain you'll figure it out.

Don't thank me, next time I need to use collectl, I am calling on you.

Good Luck.

[Merrattic]

Revisited this issue and eventually came up with a small bash script using top to capture a "running" (as opposed to sleeping) process:

#!/bin/bash

while :         # infinite loop until condition satisfied
do
if top -bcn 1 | grep "mplayer" | grep "R"; then
# "Do Something"
break
fi
done

Needs more work to do what I want but just showing the basics for now

EDIT

Final script in place:

#!/bin/bash

if top -d 1 -bcn 180 | grep "mplayer" | grep "R"; then
echo "Running"
else
echo passwd | sudo -S shutdown -r now
fi

and a crontab job:

*/10 * * * * /home/dpf/running.sh

The "180" means that top will look every second for 3 minutes. If it can grep an "R" in that time (images currently on screen for @ 2.5 mins) then all is OK, if it can't then it restarts the PC (lazy I know, will work on better solution, but it reboots so quickly, it makes not much difference). The crontab runs every 10 minutes. Only problem I have spotted is that sometimes mplayer doesn't move from S to R when it changes pictures (or this hapens so fast I don't see it or top doesn't capture it. top allows fractions of seconds so adjusting the runtime might sort this out. Would be easier if I could figure out a way to capture CPU % from top instead of S & R.....

[EDIT]

Neater solution without having to reboot:

#!/bin/bash

if top -d 1 -bcn 180 | grep "mplayer" | grep "R"; then
echo "Running"
else
screen -X quit #(stops gnu-screen)
echo passwd | sudo -S openvt -f -c 1 ./myscript.sh  #(restarts script on actual physical display)
fi

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...6#post12644806