Our team was porting our middleware product to an appliance environment (stripped linux os, hardened image). We had a config script that we used internally for

Our team was porting our middleware product to an appliance environment (stripped linux os, hardened image). We had a config script that we used internally for test environments, and were hoping to use it on box until our code covered this part of the setup process. It relied on starting several services in order, and checking certain things were running at various points, by parsing the output of 'ps'. Unfortunately, the appliance used a BusyBox version of 'ps' that truncated the output. I ended up writing a shellscript that checked /proc manually and echoed a string that would match the main offenders, aliased 'ps' to the new script, ran the setup and it worked first time. I used it on our nightly test runs for ~ 3 months without issue, until it was properly replaced.