[GLLUG] Questions about shell scripting

[Charles Ulrich]

On 2012-06-14 18:20, David Lee Lambert wrote:
> 2 quick questions:
>
> 1:  Is it possible to run a shell function in the background with
> "&"?

Yes, but it might depend on the shell.

> 2:  What's a good idiom for starting several jobs in the
> background,  then waiting for them all to complete,  returning
> nonzero and printing an error if any of them fail?

I don't know of a way to monitor the return status of the background 
jobs (which is not to say it isn't possible), but you may have to have 
them write their status to a pipe or file or something and check that 
periodically.

Also check out GNU parallel and pexec, these are utilities for running 
parallel jobs from the shell.

Charles