Several suggestions have been made for how to check that zope is running. There was some discussion of what pattern to look for. Generally, the "ps" method can be adjusted to your system by doing a plain "ps ax", looking for the line that seems to be the zope process, and then using a grep for that pattern. e.g. ps ax found ZoPe-foo then use ps ax | grep ZoPe-foo This (and the other method proposed) still have the disadvantage that it cannot detect a hung zope process, of course. To do that from the command line, create an very simple page containing the string "all-is-alll" (for example) with a URL like http://127.0.0.1/i_am_alive and then from the command line use something like lynx -dump http://127.0.0.1/i_am_alive | grep all-is-well Greg