To check whether a process was restarted, look ‘/var/run/{process name}.pid’ file’s timestamp.
# before % ll /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5 March 22 11:10 /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid # restart % sudo service apache2 restart * Restarting web server apache2 # the timestamp has updated % ll /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5 March 22 11:25 /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid