Is that process running?

["Dan Bar Dov" <Dan_Bar_Dov etagon com>]

This is probably a historical question, yet I'd like to re-open it.

What is the best way to determine if a process is up?

Best way = portable across linux distributions, quick, relies on minimum
availability of resources

Checkproc for example is used in init.d scripts on SuSE, but is not a
command in RedHat distribs. A chkproc function is used by RedHat for the
same purpose, but is not available except for init scripts.

The command pidof(8) is a good candidate. Another is pgrep (a canned ps
and grep?).
Pidof is packaged in sysvinit, while pgrep is part of a "ps" package.

Another complicating question is LSB. Should it be taken into account?

Regards,
Dan