Shell Help

[Simon Wistow]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 04:20:36PM +0100, Fred Youhanaie said:
> How about a sub-shell to cover the whole lot?
> 
> 	(output=`...`
> 	if ...
> 	...
> 	fi ) &

At first I thought this was the solution but it still doesn't work 
since, unfortunately, I need the PID if it does succeed to store in a 
PID file. Although I can possibly work round that by grepp ps ... except 
that's far too horrible to even admit.

Adn, having tried just that, it doesn't work since $! gets populated 
anyway. 

I hate shell programming.
 
> You can also redirect to a file, then check size of file, instead of 
> $output.

No can do - chatty app spews a bunch of stuff to STDOUT on start up of 
variable length. If there's an error it just prints more stuff to 
STDOUT but I can't guarantee that I'll be able to tell the difference 
between a normal