It does. It looks if that specific process id found within the hashcat.pid file is still running.
Since tea-er's pid is strangely pid 5 (wtf ?) it might be the case that it always finds a pid with pid 5. not sure why it is pid 5.
Still, by deleting the hashcat.pid file the problem should be kind of "bypassed". In theory we should check if the "cmdline" file under /proc/$pid/cmdline also says that this PID is a "hashcat" command, otherwise this could be kind of misused as a dos (denial of service, e.g. with pid 1).
In theory, we could also check that the pid is not too low (e.g. 0, 1 etc)
Since tea-er's pid is strangely pid 5 (wtf ?) it might be the case that it always finds a pid with pid 5. not sure why it is pid 5.
Still, by deleting the hashcat.pid file the problem should be kind of "bypassed". In theory we should check if the "cmdline" file under /proc/$pid/cmdline also says that this PID is a "hashcat" command, otherwise this could be kind of misused as a dos (denial of service, e.g. with pid 1).
In theory, we could also check that the pid is not too low (e.g. 0, 1 etc)