capture pid from process started by su command

[Scott Williams_5]

Hi all,

I have a script that starts custom applications as a particular user. Is it possible to start a program via su and capture the pid of program just started?

Example:
su someuser -c "proga.exe &"

Cheers,

Scott

[Duncan Edmonstone]

well $! gives you the pid of the last process started in the background, so as long as you redirect all other output, you could do domthing like this

pid=$(su someuser -c "proga.exe >/tmp/proga.output.log 2>&1 & ; echo $?" )

HTH

Duncan

[Duncan Edmonstone]

oops, of course that should have been:

pid=$(su someuser -c "proga.exe >/tmp/proga.output.log 2>&1 & ; echo $!" )

HTH

Duncan

[Renda Skandier]

you can grep for program name, excluding the grep command

progname=$1
PID=`ps -ef | grep $progname | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`

[Scott Williams_5]

Thank you for your responses. I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply...I have tried your suggestion, and am running into a bit of a snag. The "echo $!" is not returning a value. I've attached a snippit of code and the output I get back..

Appreciate your help.

Scott

[Jeff_Traigle · Accepted solution]

The only way I see to make this work in this manner is to put your commands in a wrapper script that would be called from su. I haven't found a syntax that will allow running multiple commands in a single line from su with the semicolon.

[Scott Williams_5]

Jeff, Duncan, Renda: Thanks for your repsones. Given my trials, I suspected I'd have to something similar to a separate script. I'm movin' on...

thanks,

Scott