Execute multiple shell scripts concurrently

Question

I want to do the following things:

• Execute multiple shell scripts (here 2 scripts) concurrently.

• Wait until both scripts finish

Answer 1

Backticks do not give the value returned by the command, but the output of the command. To get the return values:

#!/bin/sh

./a.sh &
./b.sh
ret2=$?   # get value returned by b.sh
wait %1   # Wait for a.sh to finish
ret1=$?   # get value returned by a.sh
echo "$ret1: $ret2"

If you mistated the question and do in fact want the output of the commands, you get that as well since they will both go to the stdout of the script.