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 as a background process (CMD &).
2. In the main script, have a loop to monitor the spawned command every few seconds. The loop also echoes some messages to stdout indicating progress of the script.
3. Exit the loop when the spawned command terminates.
4. Capture and report the exit code of the spawned process.

Can someone give me pointers to accomplish this?

Answer 1

1: In bash, $! holds the PID of the last background process that was executed. That will tell you what process to monitor, anyway.

4: wait <n> waits until the process with PID <n> is complete (it will block until the process completes, so you might not want to call this until you are sure the process is done), and then returns the exit code of the completed process.

2, 3: ps or ps | grep " $! " can tell you whether the process is still running. It is up to you how to understand the output and decide how close it is to finishing. (ps | grep isn't idiot-proof. If you have time you can come up with a more robust way to tell whether the process is still running).

Here's a skeleton script:

# simulate a long process that will have an identifiable exit code
(sleep 15 ; /bin/false) &
my_pid=$!

while   ps | grep " $my_pid "     # might also need  | grep -v grep  here
do
    echo $my_pid is still in the ps output. Must still be running.
    sleep 3
done

echo Oh, it looks like the process is done.
wait $my_pid
# The variable $? always holds the exit code of the last command to finish.
# Here it holds the exit code of $my_pid, since wait exits with that code. 
my_status=$?
echo The exit status of the process was $my_status