Synchronizing four shell scripts to run one after another in unix

Question

I have 4 shell script to generate a file(let\'s say param.txt) which is used by another tool(informatica) and as the tool is done with processing, it deletes param.txt.

Answer 1

You can use GNU Parallel as a counting semaphore or a mutex, by invoking it as sem instead of as parallel. Scroll down to Mutex on this page.

So, you could use:

sem --id myGlobalId 'create input file; run informatica'
sem --id myGlobalId 'create input file; run informatica'
sem --id myGlobalId 'create input file; run informatica'
sem --id myGlobalId 'create input file; run informatica'

Note I have specified a global id in case you run the jobs from different terminals or cron. This is not necessary if you are starting all jobs from one terminal.