[TriLUG] process monitoring

[Mike M]

I want to monitor the existance of a process.  All I ever know is the name of 
the process. I came up with the following:

$ ps -C process_cmd_name > temp
$ ls -l temp

if temp size is 0 then process does not exist else it does exist

I was going to use the getsize function in the os.path module in Python for 
the ls function above.

Anybody think of another way to accomplish this?

Thanks
-- 
Mike M.