Question on ps

We have a simple shell monitoring script that runs out of cron every 5
minutes. It does a 'ps -e' and then grep's to see if the process is
running. If it's not, a pager goes off to alert an operator.

99.99% of the time it works fine, but every so often we get a 'false
positive', and I now know why. Normally the "ps" output for the process
will appear as:

1481	pts/5	I	+	02:43:33	vlink_preparation.tcl

However, this morning when we received a false positive, the "ps" output
looked like this:

1481	pts/5	R	+	02:38:19	[vlink_preparatio]

This caused my script to be unhappy, because it's greping for the full
process name.

If anyone knows what the brackets mean, and why it truncates the name, I
would be appreciative!!!

Much thanks,

Chris