Puppet service status check for multiple processes

I had a situation where a single init.d script fires off multiple processes. In order for puppet to check that this service was running, I had to grep ps aux for the two processes.

The status declaration below greps ps aux for “foobar” or “foocat” and pipes it to wc -l to get the number of lines, which should be at least 2. “egrep -v egrep” excludes the actual egrep process so it does not accidentally get counted.

service { ‘foo’:
      ensure    => running,
      enable    => true,
      hasstatus => false,
      # checks both foobar and foocat are running 
      status    => “test `ps aux | egrep ‘foobar|foocat’ | egrep -v egrep | wc -l` -gt 1”,
      require   => File[‘/etc/init.d/foo’],
}