[lug] checking bg processes' exit status

[Lori Reed]

Nick Golder wrote:

> On 2008-03-04 11:29 -0700, Jeffrey Haemer wrote:
>> Nick,
>>
>> The biggest problem is saving $? for each command, especially when you're
>> throwing some or all of them into the background, so they run in parallel.
>>
>> An easy solution, if practical, is to wrap each process in a shell script
>> that saves its exit status.
>> Thus
>>
> 
> Thanks for the example!  I was trying to do something very similar sans
> the extra script.  I was trying to use a function that gets background'd
> and uses variable to return an exit code.  It's ends up not being all
> that elegant since bash doesn't have a garbage collector - all I end up
> doing is polluting the variable space.  I could just go through and
> unset all of the variables -or- I could just use your example.  When I
> have time I am going to try get this going.  One of the targets is a
> read-only filesystem that have nothing that is easily writeable (not my
> design)...

Are you interested in a solution in C? I have sample code that starts 
multiple child processes and collects the exit status of each child 
process as it exits.  This could be easily expanded to do something 
interesting with the exit status.

If you're not a C hacker the answer is probably no, or I could be hired 
to do what ever is needed. :)

Lori