`kill "$!"` doesn't work when FOR loop is around - linux

It seems that kill "$!" command doesn't work if FOR loop is involved.
The script below triggers 2 functions, main and the progress, to run simultaneously. Once the main is done, the progress being killed:
#!/bin/bash
functionA() { # MAIN
sleep 15
}
functionB() { #PROGRESS
local A=${1:-30}
local B=${2:-1}
local C=${3:-"X"}
local D=${4:-"*"}
local i
while true
do
echo -en "["
for i in $(seq 1 "$A")
do
echo -en "$C"
done
echo -en "]\0015["
for i in $(seq 1 "$A")
do
echo -en "$D"
sleep "${B}"
done
echo
done
}
functionB 10 &
progress_PID="$!"
functionA
kill "$progress_PID" # Stop the progress bar
echo "Finished"
It works very well.
However, when i put into the functionA the real code it should use, that contains a FOR loop, the progress never ends, despite the main function has finished a long ago:
functionA() {
for IP in "${book[#]}"; do
ssh user#"$IP" "sleep 15" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
done
wait
}
I tried to add echo "$!" to catch if the "$!" is caught well. It is, the process ID is constant, but i cannot see it in the shell because probably it exists only in subshell.
Why the progress_PID="$!" is not being killed, despite it is obviously being aught?
(Please explain the solution)

I suspect your wait is also waiting for the backgrounded progress bar. Try capturing the specific pids of the backgrounded ssh instances, and waiting on them specifically:
functionA() {
local a=()
for IP in "${book[#]}"; do
ssh user#"$IP" "sleep 15" > /dev/null 2>&1 &
a+=($!)
done
wait "${a[#]}"
}
This places the pids of backgrounded sshes into an array, then waits on the members of the array rather than "everything that is backgrounded", which is wait's default behaviour. The bash man page states:
If n̲ is not given, all currently active child processes are waited for
Note: untested. May contain nuts.

Related

Can I detect early exit from a long-running, backgrounded process?

I'm trying to improve the startup scripts for several servers running in a cluster environment. The server processes should run indefinitely but occasionally fails on startup issuing e.g., Address already in use exceptions.
I'd like the exit code for the startup script to reflect these early terminations by, say, waiting for 1 second and telling me if the server seems to have started okay. I also need the server PID echoed.
Here's my best shot so far:
$ cat startup.sh
# start the server in the bg but if it fails in the first second,
# then kill startup.sh.
CMD="start_server -option1 foo -option2 bar"
eval "($CMD >> cc.log 2>&1 || kill -9 $$ &)"
SERVER_PID=$!
# the `kill` above only has 1 second to kill me-- otherwise my exit code is 0
sleep 1
echo $SERVER_PID
The exit code works fine but two problems remain:
If the server is long-running but eventually encounters an error, the parent startup.sh will have exited already and the $$ PID may have been reused by an unrelated process which this script will then kill off.
The SERVER_PID isn't correct since it's the PID of the subshell rather than the start_server command (which in this case is a grandchild of the startup.sh script.
Is there a simpler way to background the start_server process, get its PID, and use a timeout'ed check for error codes? I looked into bash builtins wait and timeout but they don't seem to work for processes that shouldn't exit in the end.
I can't change the server code and the startup script should not run indefinitely.
You can also use coproc (and look, I'm putting the command in an array, and also with proper quoting!):
#!/bin/bash
cmd=( start_server -option1 foo -option2 bar )
coproc mycoprocfd { "${cmd[#]}" >> cc.log 2>&1 ; }
server_pid=$!
sleep 1
if [[ -z "${mycoprocfd[#]}" ]]; then
echo >&2 "Failure detected when starting server! Server died before 1 second."
exit 1
else
echo $server_pid
fi
The trick is that coproc puts the file descriptors of the redirections of stdin and stdout in a prescribed array (here mycoprocfd) and empties the array when the process exits. So you don't need to do clumsy stuff with the PID itself.
You can hence check for the server to never exit as so:
#!/bin/bash
cmd=( start_server -option1 foo -option2 bar )
coproc mycoprocfd { "${cmd[#]}" >> cc.log 2>&1 ; }
server_pid=$!
read -u "${mycoprocfd[0]}"
echo >&2 "Oh dear, the server with PID $server_pid died after $SECONDS seconds."
exit 1
That's because read will read on the file descriptor given by coproc (but nothing is ever read here, since the stdout of your command has been redirected to a file!), and read exits when the file descriptor is closed, i.e., when the command launched by coproc exits.
I'd say this is a really elegant solution!
Now, this script will live as long as the coproc lives. I understood that's not what you want. In this case, you can timeout the read with its -t option, and then you'll use the fact that return's exit status is greater than 128 if it timed out. E.g., for a 4.5 seconds timeout
#!/bin/bash
timeout=4.5
cmd=( start_server -option1 foo -option2 bar )
coproc mycoprocfd { "${cmd[#]}" >> cc.log 2>&1 ; }
server_pid=$!
read -t $timeout -u "${mycoprocfd[0]}"
if (($?>128)); then
echo "$server_pid <-- all is good, it's still alive after $timeout seconds."
else
echo >&2 "Oh dear, the server with PID $server_pid died after $timeout seconds."
exit 1
fi
exit 0 # Yay
This is also very elegant :).
Use, extend, and adapt to your needs! (but with good practices!)
Hope this helps!
Remarks.
coproc is a bash-builtin that appeared in bash 4.0. The solutions shown here are 100% pure bash (except the first one, with sleep, which is not the best one at all!).
The use of coproc in scripts is almost always superior to putting jobs in background with & and doing clumsy and awkward stuff with sleep and checking $!.
If you want coproc to keep quiet, whatever happens (e.g., if there's an error launching the command, which is fine here since you're handling everything yourself), do:
coproc mycoprocfd { "${cmd[#]}" >> cc.log 2>&1 ; } > /dev/null 2>&1
20 minutes of more googling revealed https://stackoverflow.com/a/6756971/494983 and kill -0 $PID from https://stackoverflow.com/a/14296353/494983.
So it seems I can use:
$ cat startup.sh
CMD="start_server -option1 foo -option2 bar"
eval "$CMD >> cc.log 2>&1 &"
SERVER_PID=$!
sleep 1
kill -0 $SERVER_PID
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
echo "Failure detected when starting server! PID $SERVER_PID doesn't exist!" 1>&2
exit 1
else
echo $SERVER_PID
fi
This wouldn't work for processes that I can't send signals to but works well enough in my case (where startup.sh starts the server itself).

Infinite loop shell script not getting killed

I'm trying to do some tasks in linux (benchmark test on mysql which will take upto 1 or 2 hour) using shell script and in the meantime itself, i need to run another script in parallel which would take output of the task in every 10 or 20 mins and write the output to a file. Now, once the task is finished, I would like to stop the second script and get the output. But its not happening. Here is what I did so far:
taskscript - Where I'm performing an 1 or 2 hr task
#!/bin/sh
#Here I'm doing some task which takes upto 1 hr
#For simulating test
sleep 10
echo "Task Finished" > "task.txt";
infintequery - Script which will take the output of task in parallel
#!/bin/sh
while true;
do
sleep 10;
#Here I'm querying task result and store it to a an output file with timestamp
#For simulating test, just writing time only
echo $(date +"%m/%d %T") >> "infinite.txt";
done
mainscript - The main script which runs both the scripts in parallel
#!/bin/sh
sh ./taskscript 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
pid1=$!
sh ./infintequery 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
pid2=$!
wait $pid1
ret1=$?
wait $pid2
ret2=$?
if [ $ret1 -eq 0 ]
then
echo "Completed succesfully"
kill $pid2
else
echo "Failed to complete script"
fi
After I executing ./mainscript, following was the output
task.txt was generated after 10 seconds
infinite.txt was appended with time every 10 seconds.
The script never get finished and infinite.txt gets updated every 10
seconds.
I want the mainscript to stop execution after taskscript was finished, but the mainscript was also not finishing and even after I give Ctrl-C, the infinite.txt is still getting updated.
So guys, please help me to solve this issue. What am I doing wrong here? I'm not that experianced in shell scripting, these codes are all taken from some posts in SO itself.
Thanks In Advance
This piece of code here:
wait $pid1
ret1=$?
wait $pid2
will ensure it waits for both processes to finish and hence mainscript will never get to the kill statement.
That's because infintequery (I assume that was meant to be infinite but I'll spell it the same way you have) will never exit and mainscript will be forever waiting at the wait $pid2 line.
If you just want to wait for taskscript to finish then kill off infintequery, use something like:
#!/bin/sh
sh ./taskscript 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
pid1=$!
sh ./infintequery 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
pid2=$!
wait $pid1
ret1=$?
kill $pid2
if [ $ret1 -eq 0 ]
then
echo "Completed successfully"
else
echo "Failed to complete script"
fi
That will simply wait for taskscript to finish and then kill off infintequery regardless of whether taskscript was successful or not.
Of course, that's assuming taskscript has to be running before infintequery starts (the likely case since the latter will probably end up using some information from the former). If it doesn't have to be running first, you can simplify by not running it in the background:
#!/bin/sh
sh ./infintequery 1>/dev/null 2>&1 &
pid2=$!
sh ./taskscript 1>/dev/null 2>&1
ret1=$?
kill $pid2
if [ $ret1 -eq 0 ]
then
echo "Completed successfully"
else
echo "Failed to complete script"
fi
Another soln without changing your main script and if not comfortable with wait and pids.
Add this line in loop in infintequery file.
if [ `grep "Task Finished" input | wc -l` -eq 1 ]; then exit; fi

wait child process but get error: 'pid is not a child of this shell'

I write a script to get data from HDFS parrallel,then I wait these child processes in a for loop, but sometimes it returns "pid is not a child of this shell". sometimes, it works well。It's so puzzled. I use "jobs -l" to show all the jobs run in the background. I am sure these pid is the child process of the shell process, and I use "ps aux" to make sure these pids is note assign to other process. Here is my script.
PID=()
FILE=()
let serial=0
while read index_tar
do
echo $index_tar | grep index > /dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]
then
continue
fi
suffix=`printf '%03d' $serial`
mkdir input/output_$suffix
$HADOOP_HOME/bin/hadoop fs -cat $index_tar | tar zxf - -C input/output_$suffix \
&& mv input/output_$suffix/index_* input/output_$suffix/index &
PID[$serial]=$!
FILE[$serial]=$index_tar
let serial++
done < file.list
for((i=0;i<$serial;i++))
do
wait ${PID[$i]}
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]
then
LOG "get ${FILE[$i]} failed, PID:${PID[$i]}"
exit -1
else
LOG "get ${FILE[$i]} success, PID:${PID[$i]}"
fi
done
Just find the process id of the process you want to wait for and replace that with 12345 in below script. Further changes can be made as per your requirement.
#!/bin/sh
PID=12345
while [ -e /proc/$PID ]
do
echo "Process: $PID is still running" >> /home/parv/waitAndRun.log
sleep .6
done
echo "Process $PID has finished" >> /home/parv/waitAndRun.log
/usr/bin/waitingScript.sh
http://iamparv.blogspot.in/2013/10/unix-wait-for-running-process-not-child.html
Either your while loop or the for loop runs in a subshell, which is why you cannot await a child of the (parent, outer) shell.
Edit this might happen if the while loop or for loop is actually
(a) in a {...} block
(b) participating in a piper (e.g. for....done|somepipe)
If you're running this in a container of some sort, the condition apparently can be caused by a bug in bash that is easier to encounter in a containerized envrionment.
From my reading of the bash source (specifically see comments around RECYCLES_PIDS and CHILD_MAX in bash-4.2/jobs.c), it looks like in their effort to optimize their tracking of background jobs, they leave themselves vulnerable to PID aliasing (where a new process might obscure the status of an old one); to mitigate that, they prune their background process history (apparently as mandated by POSIX?). If you should happen to want to wait on a pruned process, the shell can't find it in the history and assumes this to mean that it never knew about it (i.e., that it "is not a child of this shell").

bash: silently kill background function process

shell gurus,
I have a bash shell script, in which I launch a background function, say foo(), to display a progress bar for a boring and long command:
foo()
{
while [ 1 ]
do
#massively cool progress bar display code
sleep 1
done
}
foo &
foo_pid=$!
boring_and_long_command
kill $foo_pid >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 10
now, when foo dies, I see the following text:
/home/user/script: line XXX: 30290 Killed foo
This totally destroys the awesomeness of my, otherwise massively cool, progress bar display.
How do I get rid of this message?
kill $foo_pid
wait $foo_pid 2>/dev/null
BTW, I don't know about your massively cool progress bar, but have you seen Pipe Viewer (pv)? http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml
Just came across this myself, and realised "disown" is what we are looking for.
foo &
foo_pid=$!
disown
boring_and_long_command
kill $foo_pid
sleep 10
The death message is being printed because the process is still in the shells list of watched "jobs". The disown command will remove the most recently spawned process from this list so that no debug message will be generated when it is killed, even with SIGKILL (-9).
Try to replace your line kill $foo_pid >/dev/null 2>&1 with the line:
(kill $foo_pid 2>&1) >/dev/null
Update:
This answer is not correct for the reason explained by #mklement0 in his comment:
The reason this answer isn't effective with background jobs is that
Bash itself asynchronously, after the kill command has completed,
outputs a status message about the killed job, which you cannot
suppress directly - unless you use wait, as in the accepted answer.
This "hack" seems to work:
# Some trickery to hide killed message
exec 3>&2 # 3 is now a copy of 2
exec 2> /dev/null # 2 now points to /dev/null
kill $foo_pid >/dev/null 2>&1
sleep 1 # sleep to wait for process to die
exec 2>&3 # restore stderr to saved
exec 3>&- # close saved version
and it was inspired from here. World order has been restored.
This is a solution I came up with for a similar problem (wanted to display a timestamp during long running processes). This implements a killsub function that allows you to kill any subshell quietly as long as you know the pid. Note, that the trap instructions are important to include: in case the script is interrupted, the subshell will not continue to run.
foo()
{
while [ 1 ]
do
#massively cool progress bar display code
sleep 1
done
}
#Kills the sub process quietly
function killsub()
{
kill -9 ${1} 2>/dev/null
wait ${1} 2>/dev/null
}
foo &
foo_pid=$!
#Add a trap incase of unexpected interruptions
trap 'killsub ${foo_pid}; exit' INT TERM EXIT
boring_and_long_command
#Kill foo after finished
killsub ${foo_pid}
#Reset trap
trap - INT TERM EXIT
Add at the start of the function:
trap 'exit 0' TERM
You can use set +m before to suppress that. More information on that here
Another way to do it:
func_terminate_service(){
[[ "$(pidof ${1})" ]] && killall ${1}
sleep 2
[[ "$(pidof ${1})" ]] && kill -9 "$(pidof ${1})"
}
call it with
func_terminate_service "firefox"
Yet another way to disable job notifications is to put your command to be backgrounded in a sh -c 'cmd &' construct.
#!/bin/bash
foo()
{
while [ 1 ]
do
sleep 1
done
}
#foo &
#foo_pid=$!
export -f foo
foo_pid=`sh -c 'foo & echo ${!}' | head -1`
# if shell does not support exporting functions (export -f foo)
#arg1='foo() { while [ 1 ]; do sleep 1; done; }'
#foo_pid=`sh -c 'eval "$1"; foo & echo ${!}' _ "$arg1" | head -1`
sleep 3
echo kill ${foo_pid}
kill ${foo_pid}
sleep 3
exit
The error message should come from the default signal handler which dump the signal source in the script. I met the similar errors only on bash 3.x and 4.x. To always quietly kill the child process everywhere(tested on bash 3/4/5, dash, ash, zsh), we could trap the TERM signal at the very first of child process:
#!/bin/sh
## assume script name is test.sh
foo() {
trap 'exit 0' TERM ## here is the key
while true; do sleep 1; done
}
echo before child
ps aux | grep 'test\.s[h]\|slee[p]'
foo &
foo_pid=$!
sleep 1 # wait trap is done
echo before kill
ps aux | grep 'test\.s[h]\|slee[p]'
kill $foo_pid
sleep 1 # wait kill is done
echo after kill
ps aux | grep 'test\.s[h]\|slee[p]'

Get exit code of a background process

I have a command CMD called from my main bourne shell script that takes forever.
I want to modify the script as follows:
Run the command CMD in parallel as a background process (CMD &).
In the main script, have a loop to monitor the spawned command every few seconds. The loop also echoes some messages to stdout indicating progress of the script.
Exit the loop when the spawned command terminates.
Capture and report the exit code of the spawned process.
Can someone give me pointers to accomplish this?
1: In bash, $! holds the PID of the last background process that was executed. That will tell you what process to monitor, anyway.
4: wait <n> waits until the process with PID <n> is complete (it will block until the process completes, so you might not want to call this until you are sure the process is done), and then returns the exit code of the completed process.
2, 3: ps or ps | grep " $! " can tell you whether the process is still running. It is up to you how to understand the output and decide how close it is to finishing. (ps | grep isn't idiot-proof. If you have time you can come up with a more robust way to tell whether the process is still running).
Here's a skeleton script:
# simulate a long process that will have an identifiable exit code
(sleep 15 ; /bin/false) &
my_pid=$!
while ps | grep " $my_pid " # might also need | grep -v grep here
do
echo $my_pid is still in the ps output. Must still be running.
sleep 3
done
echo Oh, it looks like the process is done.
wait $my_pid
# The variable $? always holds the exit code of the last command to finish.
# Here it holds the exit code of $my_pid, since wait exits with that code.
my_status=$?
echo The exit status of the process was $my_status
This is how I solved it when I had a similar need:
# Some function that takes a long time to process
longprocess() {
# Sleep up to 14 seconds
sleep $((RANDOM % 15))
# Randomly exit with 0 or 1
exit $((RANDOM % 2))
}
pids=""
# Run five concurrent processes
for i in {1..5}; do
( longprocess ) &
# store PID of process
pids+=" $!"
done
# Wait for all processes to finish, will take max 14s
# as it waits in order of launch, not order of finishing
for p in $pids; do
if wait $p; then
echo "Process $p success"
else
echo "Process $p fail"
fi
done
The pid of a backgrounded child process is stored in $!.
You can store all child processes' pids into an array, e.g. PIDS[].
wait [-n] [jobspec or pid …]
Wait until the child process specified by each process ID pid or job specification jobspec exits and return the exit status of the last command waited for. If a job spec is given, all processes in the job are waited for. If no arguments are given, all currently active child processes are waited for, and the return status is zero. If the -n option is supplied, wait waits for any job to terminate and returns its exit status. If neither jobspec nor pid specifies an active child process of the shell, the return status is 127.
Use wait command you can wait for all child processes finish, meanwhile you can get exit status of each child processes via $? and store status into STATUS[]. Then you can do something depending by status.
I have tried the following 2 solutions and they run well. solution01 is
more concise, while solution02 is a little complicated.
solution01
#!/bin/bash
# start 3 child processes concurrently, and store each pid into array PIDS[].
process=(a.sh b.sh c.sh)
for app in ${process[#]}; do
./${app} &
PIDS+=($!)
done
# wait for all processes to finish, and store each process's exit code into array STATUS[].
for pid in ${PIDS[#]}; do
echo "pid=${pid}"
wait ${pid}
STATUS+=($?)
done
# after all processed finish, check their exit codes in STATUS[].
i=0
for st in ${STATUS[#]}; do
if [[ ${st} -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "$i failed"
else
echo "$i finish"
fi
((i+=1))
done
solution02
#!/bin/bash
# start 3 child processes concurrently, and store each pid into array PIDS[].
i=0
process=(a.sh b.sh c.sh)
for app in ${process[#]}; do
./${app} &
pid=$!
PIDS[$i]=${pid}
((i+=1))
done
# wait for all processes to finish, and store each process's exit code into array STATUS[].
i=0
for pid in ${PIDS[#]}; do
echo "pid=${pid}"
wait ${pid}
STATUS[$i]=$?
((i+=1))
done
# after all processed finish, check their exit codes in STATUS[].
i=0
for st in ${STATUS[#]}; do
if [[ ${st} -ne 0 ]]; then
echo "$i failed"
else
echo "$i finish"
fi
((i+=1))
done
As I see almost all answers use external utilities (mostly ps) to poll the state of the background process. There is a more unixesh solution, catching the SIGCHLD signal. In the signal handler it has to be checked which child process was stopped. It can be done by kill -0 <PID> built-in (universal) or checking the existence of /proc/<PID> directory (Linux specific) or using the jobs built-in (bash specific. jobs -l also reports the pid. In this case the 3rd field of the output can be Stopped|Running|Done|Exit . ).
Here is my example.
The launched process is called loop.sh. It accepts -x or a number as an argument. For -x is exits with exit code 1. For a number it waits num*5 seconds. In every 5 seconds it prints its PID.
The launcher process is called launch.sh:
#!/bin/bash
handle_chld() {
local tmp=()
for((i=0;i<${#pids[#]};++i)); do
if [ ! -d /proc/${pids[i]} ]; then
wait ${pids[i]}
echo "Stopped ${pids[i]}; exit code: $?"
else tmp+=(${pids[i]})
fi
done
pids=(${tmp[#]})
}
set -o monitor
trap "handle_chld" CHLD
# Start background processes
./loop.sh 3 &
pids+=($!)
./loop.sh 2 &
pids+=($!)
./loop.sh -x &
pids+=($!)
# Wait until all background processes are stopped
while [ ${#pids[#]} -gt 0 ]; do echo "WAITING FOR: ${pids[#]}"; sleep 2; done
echo STOPPED
For more explanation see: Starting a process from bash script failed
#/bin/bash
#pgm to monitor
tail -f /var/log/messages >> /tmp/log&
# background cmd pid
pid=$!
# loop to monitor running background cmd
while :
do
ps ax | grep $pid | grep -v grep
ret=$?
if test "$ret" != "0"
then
echo "Monitored pid ended"
break
fi
sleep 5
done
wait $pid
echo $?
I would change your approach slightly. Rather than checking every few seconds if the command is still alive and reporting a message, have another process that reports every few seconds that the command is still running and then kill that process when the command finishes. For example:
#!/bin/sh
cmd() { sleep 5; exit 24; }
cmd & # Run the long running process
pid=$! # Record the pid
# Spawn a process that coninually reports that the command is still running
while echo "$(date): $pid is still running"; do sleep 1; done &
echoer=$!
# Set a trap to kill the reporter when the process finishes
trap 'kill $echoer' 0
# Wait for the process to finish
if wait $pid; then
echo "cmd succeeded"
else
echo "cmd FAILED!! (returned $?)"
fi
Our team had the same need with a remote SSH-executed script which was timing out after 25 minutes of inactivity. Here is a solution with the monitoring loop checking the background process every second, but printing only every 10 minutes to suppress an inactivity timeout.
long_running.sh &
pid=$!
# Wait on a background job completion. Query status every 10 minutes.
declare -i elapsed=0
# `ps -p ${pid}` works on macOS and CentOS. On both OSes `ps ${pid}` works as well.
while ps -p ${pid} >/dev/null; do
sleep 1
if ((++elapsed % 600 == 0)); then
echo "Waiting for the completion of the main script. $((elapsed / 60))m and counting ..."
fi
done
# Return the exit code of the terminated background process. This works in Bash 4.4 despite what Bash docs say:
# "If neither jobspec nor pid specifies an active child process of the shell, the return status is 127."
wait ${pid}
A simple example, similar to the solutions above. This doesn't require monitoring any process output. The next example uses tail to follow output.
$ echo '#!/bin/bash' > tmp.sh
$ echo 'sleep 30; exit 5' >> tmp.sh
$ chmod +x tmp.sh
$ ./tmp.sh &
[1] 7454
$ pid=$!
$ wait $pid
[1]+ Exit 5 ./tmp.sh
$ echo $?
5
Use tail to follow process output and quit when the process is complete.
$ echo '#!/bin/bash' > tmp.sh
$ echo 'i=0; while let "$i < 10"; do sleep 5; echo "$i"; let i=$i+1; done; exit 5;' >> tmp.sh
$ chmod +x tmp.sh
$ ./tmp.sh
0
1
2
^C
$ ./tmp.sh > /tmp/tmp.log 2>&1 &
[1] 7673
$ pid=$!
$ tail -f --pid $pid /tmp/tmp.log
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
[1]+ Exit 5 ./tmp.sh > /tmp/tmp.log 2>&1
$ wait $pid
$ echo $?
5
Another solution is to monitor processes via the proc filesystem (safer than ps/grep combo); when you start a process it has a corresponding folder in /proc/$pid, so the solution could be
#!/bin/bash
....
doSomething &
local pid=$!
while [ -d /proc/$pid ]; do # While directory exists, the process is running
doSomethingElse
....
else # when directory is removed from /proc, process has ended
wait $pid
local exit_status=$?
done
....
Now you can use the $exit_status variable however you like.
With this method, your script doesnt have to wait for the background process, you will only have to monitor a temporary file for the exit status.
FUNCmyCmd() { sleep 3;return 6; };
export retFile=$(mktemp);
FUNCexecAndWait() { FUNCmyCmd;echo $? >$retFile; };
FUNCexecAndWait&
now, your script can do anything else while you just have to keep monitoring the contents of retFile (it can also contain any other information you want like the exit time).
PS.: btw, I coded thinking in bash
My solution was to use an anonymous pipe to pass the status to a monitoring loop. There are no temporary files used to exchange status so nothing to cleanup. If you were uncertain about the number of background jobs the break condition could be [ -z "$(jobs -p)" ].
#!/bin/bash
exec 3<> <(:)
{ sleep 15 ; echo "sleep/exit $?" >&3 ; } &
while read -u 3 -t 1 -r STAT CODE || STAT="timeout" ; do
echo "stat: ${STAT}; code: ${CODE}"
if [ "${STAT}" = "sleep/exit" ] ; then
break
fi
done
how about ...
# run your stuff
unset PID
for process in one two three four
do
( sleep $((RANDOM%20)); echo hello from process $process; exit $((RANDOM%3)); ) & 2>&1
PID+=($!)
done
# (optional) report on the status of that stuff as it exits
for pid in "${PID[#]}"
do
( wait "$pid"; echo "process $pid complemted with exit status $?") &
done
# (optional) while we wait, monitor that stuff
while ps --pid "${PID[*]}" --ppid "${PID[*]}" --format pid,ppid,command,pcpu
do
sleep 5
done | xargs -i date '+%x %X {}'
# return non-zero if any are non zero
SUCCESS=0
for pid in "${PID[#]}"
do
wait "$pid" && ((SUCCESS++)) && echo "$pid OK" || echo "$pid returned $?"
done
echo "success for $SUCCESS out of ${#PID} jobs"
exit $(( ${#PID} - SUCCESS ))
This may be extending beyond your question, however if you're concerned about the length of time processes are running for, you may be interested in checking the status of running background processes after an interval of time. It's easy enough to check which child PIDs are still running using pgrep -P $$, however I came up with the following solution to check the exit status of those PIDs that have already expired:
cmd1() { sleep 5; exit 24; }
cmd2() { sleep 10; exit 0; }
pids=()
cmd1 & pids+=("$!")
cmd2 & pids+=("$!")
lasttimeout=0
for timeout in 2 7 11; do
echo -n "interval-$timeout: "
sleep $((timeout-lasttimeout))
# you can only wait on a pid once
remainingpids=()
for pid in ${pids[*]}; do
if ! ps -p $pid >/dev/null ; then
wait $pid
echo -n "pid-$pid:exited($?); "
else
echo -n "pid-$pid:running; "
remainingpids+=("$pid")
fi
done
pids=( ${remainingpids[*]} )
lasttimeout=$timeout
echo
done
which outputs:
interval-2: pid-28083:running; pid-28084:running;
interval-7: pid-28083:exited(24); pid-28084:running;
interval-11: pid-28084:exited(0);
Note: You could change $pids to a string variable rather than array to simplify things if you like.

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