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

I would change your approach slightly. Rather than checking every few seconds if the command is still alive and reporting a message, have another process that reports every few seconds that the command is still running and then kill that process when the command finishes. For example:

#!/bin/sh

cmd() { sleep 5; exit 24; }

cmd &   # Run the long running process
pid=$!  # Record the pid

# Spawn a process that coninually reports that the command is still running
while echo "$(date): $pid is still running"; do sleep 1; done &
echoer=$!

# Set a trap to kill the reporter when the process finishes
trap 'kill $echoer' 0

# Wait for the process to finish
if wait $pid; then
    echo "cmd succeeded"
else
    echo "cmd FAILED!! (returned $?)"
fi