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 may be extending beyond your question, however if you're concerned about the length of time processes are running for, you may be interested in checking the status of running background processes after an interval of time. It's easy enough to check which child PIDs are still running using pgrep -P $$, however I came up with the following solution to check the exit status of those PIDs that have already expired:

cmd1() { sleep 5; exit 24; }
cmd2() { sleep 10; exit 0; }

pids=()
cmd1 & pids+=("$!")
cmd2 & pids+=("$!")

lasttimeout=0
for timeout in 2 7 11; do
  echo -n "interval-$timeout: "
  sleep $((timeout-lasttimeout))

  # you can only wait on a pid once
  remainingpids=()
  for pid in ${pids[*]}; do
     if ! ps -p $pid >/dev/null ; then
        wait $pid
        echo -n "pid-$pid:exited($?); "
     else
        echo -n "pid-$pid:running; "
        remainingpids+=("$pid")
     fi
  done
  pids=( ${remainingpids[*]} )

  lasttimeout=$timeout
  echo
done

which outputs:

interval-2: pid-28083:running; pid-28084:running; 
interval-7: pid-28083:exited(24); pid-28084:running; 
interval-11: pid-28084:exited(0); 

Note: You could change $pids to a string variable rather than array to simplify things if you like.