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Minor wait behaviour thing



I'm not sure if this is even worth remarking on...

Here's a trivial script to start four jobs in the background and wait for
all four to finish.

  sleep 10 &
  pid1=$!
  echo Job 1 started, pid $pid1
  sleep 15 &
  pid2=$!
  echo Job 2 started, pid $pid2
  sleep 5 &
  pid3=$!
  echo Job 3 started, pid $pid3
  sleep 20 &
  pid4=$!
  echo Job 4 started, pid $pid4
  
  wait $pid1
  echo Job 1 finished
  wait $pid2
  echo Job 2 finished
  wait $pid3
  echo Job 3 finished
  wait $pid4
  echo Job 4 finished

As you can see, job 3 will finish before jobs 1 and 2.  Since the PID isn't
stored --- we don't know how long we'd have to keep it, so it would just
clutter up the shell --- the wait skips it.  However, it prints out a
message; here's the complete sequence:
  Job 1 started, pid 8330
  Job 2 started, pid 8331
  Job 3 started, pid 8332
  Job 4 started, pid 8333
  Job 1 finished
  Job 2 finished
  ./wait4:wait:25: pid 8332 is not a child of this shell
  Job 3 finished
  Job 4 finished
which is, at that point, correct, but confusing.  sh and ksh don't print a
message.  I wonder if it's more trouble than it's worth?

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR Ltd., Science Park, Milton Road,
Cambridge, CB4 0WH, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 392070


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