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 see lots of good examples listed on here, wanted to throw mine in as well.

#! /bin/bash

items="1 2 3 4 5 6"
pids=""

for item in $items; do
    sleep $item &
    pids+="$! "
done

for pid in $pids; do
    wait $pid
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        echo "SUCCESS - Job $pid exited with a status of $?"
    else
        echo "FAILED - Job $pid exited with a status of $?"
    fi
done

I use something very similar to start/stop servers/services in parallel and check each exit status. Works great for me. Hope this helps someone out!

Answer 2

I've just been modifying a script to background and parallelise a process.

I did some experimenting (on Solaris with both bash and ksh) and discovered that 'wait' outputs the exit status if it's not zero , or a list of jobs that return non-zero exit when no PID argument is provided. E.g.

Bash:

$ sleep 20 && exit 1 &
$ sleep 10 && exit 2 &
$ wait
[1]-  Exit 2                  sleep 20 && exit 2
[2]+  Exit 1                  sleep 10 && exit 1

Ksh:

$ sleep 20 && exit 1 &
$ sleep 10 && exit 2 &
$ wait
[1]+  Done(2)                  sleep 20 && exit 2
[2]+  Done(1)                  sleep 10 && exit 1

This output is written to stderr, so a simple solution to the OPs example could be:

#!/bin/bash

trap "rm -f /tmp/x.$$" EXIT

for i in `seq 0 9`; do
  doCalculations $i &
done

wait 2> /tmp/x.$$
if [ `wc -l /tmp/x.$$` -gt 0 ] ; then
  exit 1
fi

While this:

wait 2> >(wc -l)

will also return a count but without the tmp file. This might also be used this way, for example:

wait 2> >(if [ `wc -l` -gt 0 ] ; then echo "ERROR"; fi)

But this isn't very much more useful than the tmp file IMO. I couldn't find a useful way to avoid the tmp file whilst also avoiding running the "wait" in a subshell, which wont work at all.

Answer 3

Exactly for this purpose I wrote a bash function called :for.

Note: :for not only preserves and returns the exit code of the failing function, but also terminates all parallel running instance. Which might not be needed in this case.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Wait for pids to terminate. If one pid exits with
# a non zero exit code, send the TERM signal to all
# processes and retain that exit code
#
# usage:
# :wait 123 32
function :wait(){
    local pids=("$@")
    [ ${#pids} -eq 0 ] && return $?

    trap 'kill -INT "${pids[@]}" &>/dev/null || true; trap - INT' INT
    trap 'kill -TERM "${pids[@]}" &>/dev/null || true; trap - RETURN TERM' RETURN TERM

    for pid in "${pids[@]}"; do
        wait "${pid}" || return $?
    done

    trap - INT RETURN TERM
}

# Run a function in parallel for each argument.
# Stop all instances if one exits with a non zero
# exit code
#
# usage:
# :for func 1 2 3
#
# env:
# FOR_PARALLEL: Max functions running in parallel
function :for(){
    local f="${1}" && shift

    local i=0
    local pids=()
    for arg in "$@"; do
        ( ${f} "${arg}" ) &
        pids+=("$!")
        if [ ! -z ${FOR_PARALLEL+x} ]; then
            (( i=(i+1)%${FOR_PARALLEL} ))
            if (( i==0 )) ;then
                :wait "${pids[@]}" || return $?
                pids=()
            fi
        fi
    done && [ ${#pids} -eq 0 ] || :wait "${pids[@]}" || return $?
}

usage

for.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e

# import :for from gist: https://gist.github.com/Enteee/c8c11d46a95568be4d331ba58a702b62#file-for
# if you don't like curl imports, source the actual file here.
source <(curl -Ls https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Enteee/c8c11d46a95568be4d331ba58a702b62/raw/)

msg="You should see this three times"

:(){
  i="${1}" && shift

  echo "${msg}"

  sleep 1
  if   [ "$i" == "1" ]; then sleep 1
  elif [ "$i" == "2" ]; then false
  elif [ "$i" == "3" ]; then
    sleep 3
    echo "You should never see this"
  fi
} && :for : 1 2 3 || exit $?

echo "You should never see this"

$ ./for.sh; echo $?
You should see this three times
You should see this three times
You should see this three times
1

---

References

• [1]: blog
• [2]: gist

Answer 4

I needed this, but the target process wasn't a child of current shell, in which case wait $PID doesn't work. I did find the following alternative instead:

while [ -e /proc/$PID ]; do sleep 0.1 ; done

That relies on the presence of procfs, which may not be available (Mac doesn't provide it for example). So for portability, you could use this instead:

while ps -p $PID >/dev/null ; do sleep 0.1 ; done

Answer 5

If you have GNU Parallel installed you can do:

# If doCalculations is a function
export -f doCalculations
seq 0 9 | parallel doCalculations {}

GNU Parallel will give you exit code:

• 0 - All jobs ran without error.

• 1-253 - Some of the jobs failed. The exit status gives the number of failed jobs

• 254 - More than 253 jobs failed.

• 255 - Other error.

Watch the intro videos to learn more: http://pi.dk/1

Answer 6

The following code will wait for completion of all calculations and return exit status 1 if any of doCalculations fails.

#!/bin/bash
for i in $(seq 0 9); do
   (doCalculations $i >&2 & wait %1; echo $?) &
done | grep -qv 0 && exit 1