How to wait in bash for several subprocesses to finish and return exit code !=0 when any subprocess ends with code !=0?

Question

How to wait in a bash script for several subprocesses spawned from that script to finish and return exit code !=0 when any of the subprocesses ends with code !=0 ?

S

Answer 1

I've had a go at this and combined all the best parts from the other examples here. This script will execute the checkpids function when any background process exits, and output the exit status without resorting to polling.

#!/bin/bash

set -o monitor

sleep 2 &
sleep 4 && exit 1 &
sleep 6 &

pids=`jobs -p`

checkpids() {
    for pid in $pids; do
        if kill -0 $pid 2>/dev/null; then
            echo $pid is still alive.
        elif wait $pid; then
            echo $pid exited with zero exit status.
        else
            echo $pid exited with non-zero exit status.
        fi
    done
    echo
}

trap checkpids CHLD

wait