-- you go, jpelletier! May I ask how you learned to write such a script? I'm slogging through the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, but any additional resources would be gratefully received.

Funny thing (to me) is, once you can recognize a (relatively) simple BASH for loop like this one (I've got far enough with the ABS that I can see that it's "simple" in terms of scripting operations, even if it's not simple for me to attempt to create), you start noticing it all over the place; I just realized that (unsurprisingly), Neverwinter Nights uses a variant of this scriptlet in their fixinstall script to change the Windows-installed data files and folder names from uppercase to lower case.

I think the thing that's got me a bit stumped atm is that "check to see if .... is running"-- this is a function that I've seen before (usually in scripts to promote interoperability of Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, but there it seems to be done differently).

Yes it's OT, but 1) your problem looks to be solved; and 2) I've got you here now, and I always try to pick people's brains when I've got them in front of me so, I was wondering if there is some "standard" way to perform such a check, and where I might find documentation to learn more about how to perform such a check in a script.

Thanks for any info.

Bah! It's not complicated wizardry, I just took the instructions from a How-to somewhere and I made a script with it.

For checking process running, you can check for daemons like in this example:
For other programs, I don't really know if there is a standard way but it would be something like:
with some tests added.
I have no scripts like that at hand for now.

Hope this will help!