Checking if the X Server is running

[Matthew Wozniski]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 05:33:12PM +0100, Phil Betts wrote:
> It's probably not the cause of your problem, but you should
> never use "ps | grep xxx" to detect if a process is running.
> This is because the grep process will (sometimes) detect 
> itself and give you a false positive, and your xterm will 
> try to start when there is no server running.

A just a random snippet that I find useful for preventing just that:
ps | grep xterm
matches itself, since the command line contains 'xterm'.

ps | grep '[x]term'
doesn't match itself, since the command line no longer contains the
string 'xterm'.

It's more portable than
pgrep xterm

and it's less ugly than
ps | grep xterm | grep -v grep

So it's what I usually find myself using.

~Matt

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