How to get the PID of a process in a pipeline

Question

Consider the following simplified example:

my_prog|awk \'...\' > output.csv &
my_pid=\"$!\" #Gives the PID for awk instead of for my_prog
sleep 10
kill $my         


        

Answer 1

I was desperately looking for good solution to get all the PIDs from a pipe job, and one promising approach failed miserably (see previous revisions of this answer).

So, unfortunately, the best I could come up with is parsing the jobs -l output using GNU awk:

function last_job_pids {
    if [[ -z "${1}" ]] ; then
        return
    fi

    jobs -l | awk '
        /^\[/ { delete pids; pids[$2]=$2; seen=1; next; }
        // { if (seen) { pids[$1]=$1; } }
        END { for (p in pids) print p; }'
}