How to tell if a certain program is running?

[Zac Brown]

You could use pgrep which will return nothing if the process doesn't
exist and if it does, then it will return the process id(s).

Cheers,

Zac

Craig Hagerman wrote:
> I am wondering if there is a simple way to programatically tell if a
> given program is running. I want to write a bash script to check if a
> program is running, then if not start it.
> 
> My first idea was to try to return grep the output from 'ps ax' but
> even if a program isin't running grep will return the request you just
> made. I am sure there is a more elegant way I don't know about.
> 
> Craig
>