How to wait in bash for several subprocesses to finish and return exit code !=0 when any subprocess ends with code !=0?

Question

How to wait in a bash script for several subprocesses spawned from that script to finish and return exit code !=0 when any of the subprocesses ends with code !=0 ?

S

Answer 1

I used this recently (thanks to Alnitak):

#!/bin/bash
# activate child monitoring
set -o monitor

# locking subprocess
(while true; do sleep 0.001; done) &
pid=$!

# count, and kill when all done
c=0
function kill_on_count() {
    # you could kill on whatever criterion you wish for
    # I just counted to simulate bash's wait with no args
    [ $c -eq 9 ] && kill $pid
    c=$((c+1))
    echo -n '.' # async feedback (but you don't know which one)
}
trap "kill_on_count" CHLD

function save_status() {
    local i=$1;
    local rc=$2;
    # do whatever, and here you know which one stopped
    # but remember, you're called from a subshell
    # so vars have their values at fork time
}

# care must be taken not to spawn more than one child per loop
# e.g don't use `seq 0 9` here!
for i in {0..9}; do
    (doCalculations $i; save_status $i $?) &
done

# wait for locking subprocess to be killed
wait $pid
echo

From there one can easily extrapolate, and have a trigger (touch a file, send a signal) and change the counting criteria (count files touched, or whatever) to respond to that trigger. Or if you just want 'any' non zero rc, just kill the lock from save_status.