that email is being sent to you ONLY if it starts it up. You can modify this echo statement at the end of the script to say whatever it is that you want to help keep yourself organized:

echo "Spam Assassin was started successfully!"

Added the line to .bashrc and that worked, thanks!!!

Jay

>> echo "Spam Assassin was started successfully!"

That line is already in the wrapper script. But what is happening is that the email is being sent regardless if spamd is running or not running. Any way to send an email if spamd actually failed, not running and then restarted?

Jay

The script should not be sending anything unless spam assassin is not running and is started. So if you look at the script it first uses ps to find the total number of spamd process running. If that number is greater than 0 it exits the script without sending you an email. If it is equal to 0 it starts spam assasin, verifys that it started successfully with the RET variable and will send you an email letting you know whether spam assassin started up correctly.

You could change that last echo line to say "Spam Assassin was not running! Spam assassin was started successfully."

Hmmm, we may be up the proverbial creek here. I'm looking at "top" and notice that spamd runs and then disappears from user "root" and "nobody" which tells me that spamd only runs when an email is coming in. Does that sound reasonable? If that is the case then I may have to run this script every hour so my mailbox doesn't overflow. My hundreds of email clients will just have to put up with "spam" until it's restarted should it fail. :-)

Jay

I don't really like spam assassin in all honesty but I thought it ran all the time not only when new mail came in. I know that it spawns a child process when new mail comes in to check it but there should be a daemon or parent process running that sees the new mail and spawns it.

With some control panels the process name may be different than spamd, it's possible that your hosting company can answer that question but you may need to use ps to figure it out.

first get a pid of a running spamd process

Then get the parent process ID of it:

Then

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I may just run the script every 2 hours, spamd sometimes only fails twice daily. Running the code you posted shows a different pid almost every time it's run. Verio is no help at all and that changed the first of this year. I've been with them for a very long time starting with a VPS-1. Their support was impeccable, helpful and very knowledgeable, even had one of the guys and his wife visit with us one Mardi Gras. Not so any longer, those days are long gone. Thanks for all your help.

Cheers, Jay