Get exit code of a background process

Question

I have a command CMD called from my main bourne shell script that takes forever.

I want to modify the script as follows:

1. Run the command CMD in parallel

Answer 1

This is how I solved it when I had a similar need:

# Some function that takes a long time to process
longprocess() {
        # Sleep up to 14 seconds
        sleep $((RANDOM % 15))
        # Randomly exit with 0 or 1
        exit $((RANDOM % 2))
}

pids=""
# Run five concurrent processes
for i in {1..5}; do
        ( longprocess ) &
        # store PID of process
        pids+=" $!"
done

# Wait for all processes to finish, will take max 14s
# as it waits in order of launch, not order of finishing
for p in $pids; do
        if wait $p; then
                echo "Process $p success"
        else
                echo "Process $p fail"
        fi
done