Forking / Multi-Threaded Processes | Bash

Question

I would like to make a section of my code more efficient. I\'m thinking of making it fork off into multiple processes and have them execute 50/100 times at once, instead of

Answer 1

I don't know of any explicit fork call in bash. What you probably want to do is append & to a command that you want to run in the background. You can also use & on functions that you define within a bash script:

do_something_with_line()
{
  line=$1
  foo
  foo2
  foo3
}

for line in file
do
  do_something_with_line $line &
done

EDIT: to put a limit on the number of simultaneous background processes, you could try something like this:

for line in file
do
  while [`jobs | wc -l` -ge 50 ]
  do
    sleep 5
  done
  do_something_with_line $line &
done