You know that you can run something in the background in a bash script with ( command )&, but a coworker recently wanted to run multiple commands, wait for all of them to complete, collect and decide what to do based on their return values… this proved much trickier. Luckily there is an answer

#!/bin/bash
 
(sleep 3; exit 1)& p1=$!
(sleep 2; exit 2)& p2=$!
(sleep 1; exit 3)& p3=$!
 
wait "$p1"; r1=$?
wait "$p2"; r2=$?
wait "$p3"; r3=$?
 
echo "$p1:$r1 $p2:$r2 $p3:$r3"

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Bash, Business, CLI, Linux, Random Thoughts, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.