Anytime, and thanks for reading my posts! Glad to know I’m not just talking to myself 😛

Yes 🙂 Thanks for replay and for great tutorial!

Sorry, wasn’t really thinking when I replied before. I am running CentOS 5.10, and you are correct that grep will show up in the list of running processes. The reason that we don’t have to omit “grep” in this case though is because of the regular expression used for matching – “[j]enkins.war”. Using the square brackets on the first letter uses a character match on just that letter so that “[j]enkins” will match “jenkins” but “jenkins” won’t match “[j]enkins” (which is what shows up on the output from ps). If the square brackets are omitted then you would need to include grep -v grep. Does that make sense?

Which server do you have? I never saw grep which doesn’t show it’s own process 🙂

I agree that it certainly won’t hurt to remove “grep” from the results, but I find that because the results of ps are being passed to grep that it doesn’t show up in the output. This is the output from my dev server:

[root@dev1 ~]# ps -ef | grep [j]enkins.war
jenkins  19352     1 44 14:32 ?        00:00:11 /usr/bin/java -jar /usr/local/jenkins/jenkins.war --httpListenAddress=0.0.0.0 --httpPort=8080 $

Keep in mind that instead of using:
pid=`ps -ef | grep [j]enkins.war | wc -l`

you should use
pid=`ps -ef | grep [j]enkins.war | grep -v grep | wc -l`

Thanks!