UNIX – Start Service If Not Running

Currently this script is developed for my Raspberry Pi (Debian, Raspbian) but in time I will have it working for RHEL (Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora).

service=openvpn
running=$(ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep $service | wc -l)
#echo $running
if [ "$running" = 1 ]; then
  echo "$service is running!!!";
else
  echo "Starting $service!!!";
  sudo /etc/init.d/$service start
fi

sudo netstat -uapn | grep openvpn

In the example above I’m checking if OpenVPN is running, if it is not running it will start the service.

I set this script up as CheckOpenVPN.sh in my /opt directory so I can simply run the below.

sudo sh /opt/CheckOpenVPN.sh