Running a limited number of child processes in parallel in bash? [duplicate]

Answer 1

Here is a very good function I used to control the maximum # of jobs from bash or ksh. NOTE: the - 1 in the pgrep subtracts the wc -l subprocess.

function jobmax
{
    typeset -i MAXJOBS=$1
    sleep .1
    while (( ($(pgrep -P $$ | wc -l) - 1) >= $MAXJOBS ))
    do
        sleep .1
    done
}

nproc=5
for i in {1..100}
do
    sleep 1 &
    jobmax $nproc
done
wait # Wait for the rest