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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T08:49:37+00:00

I have the following bash script, that lists the current number of httpd processes,

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I have the following bash script, that lists the current number of httpd processes, and if it is over 60, it should email me. This works 80% of the time but for some reason sometimes it emails me anyways when it is not over 60. Any ideas?

#!/bin/bash
lines=`ps -ef|grep httpd| wc -l`
if [ "$lines" -gt "60" ]
then
        mailx -s "Over 60 httpd processes" me@me.com < /dev/null
fi
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. There is a delay between checking and emailing. In that time, some httpd processes might finish, or start, or both. So, the number of processes can be different.
    2. You are including the grep process in the processes (most of the time, it could happen that the ps finishes before grep starts). An easy way to avoid that is to change your command to ps -ef | grep [h]ttpd. This will make sure that grep doesn’t match grep [h]ttpd.
    3. On linux, you have pgrep, which might be better suited for your purposes.
    4. grep ... | wc -l can usually be replaced with grep -c ....
    5. If you want to limit the number of httpd requests, I am sure you can set it in apache configuration files.
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