What is going on with ash / sh

[Ryan Stone]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Mark Saad <nonesuch at longcount.org> wrote:
> Hackers
>  What is going on here, if I run the following shell script, what is
> the expected output . The script is named xxx
>
> #!/bin/sh
> ps -ax | grep -v grep | grep xxx
>
> Here is what I see
>
>
>  # sh xxx
> 88318  p0  S+     0:00.00 sh xxx
> 88320  p0  R+     0:00.00 sh xxx
> 88321  p0  R+     0:00.00 sh xxx
>
>
> Can someone explain this ?

ps is happening to run after sh has forked off the two grep processes
but before they exec'ed grep?