I'm running Ubuntu 11 and I'm having some issues with grep. I have a shell script (see below) which essentially checks if a certain Java program of mine is running, if not it runs it. That part works out great! If my Java application throws any kind of exception however I would like to capture that information and email it to myself. How can I go about checking to see if the call to java -jar /bin/MyApp.jar fails? I tried piping it to grep, but that doesn't seem to work. Below is the full script that I've written: #Check if MyApp.jar is running, if not run it. if [ $(ps aux | grep 'java' | grep -v grep | wc -l | tr -s "\n") -eq 0 ] then echo "PacketCapture Starting...\n" java -jar /bin/MyApp.jar echo "PacketCapture Started.\n" else echo "PacketCapture already running.\n" fi