two processes are listed for one shellscript?

Question

I have a shell script which does somewhat simple.

#!/bin/sh
do something boring...

When I execute the shell script like this,

$ nohup sh mysh.sh > /null/dev/ 2>&1 &

I see there are two processes listed.

$ ps -ef | grep mysh
... xxxxx 1     ... sh mysh.sh // same xxxxx
... yyyyy xxxxx ... sh mysh.sh // same xxxxx

Is this normal?

Answer 1

I just recreated what you have here and replaced do something boring... with sleep 10000 and did not have this happen. I believe that you are doing something which uses fork() or clone() to create a child process. I had suspected that nohup ran the process as a child process but that does not appear to be the case.

Answer 2

As you can see, yyyyy is the child process of xxxxx. It is perfectly normal that the same shell script be executed inside "mysh.sh" which will result in such a scenario.

Are you directly/indirectly invoking mysh.sh inside the script? That's the only way I could think this will ever happen.