wait child process but get error: 'pid is not a child of this shell'

Question

I write a script to get data from HDFS parrallel，then I wait these child processes in a for loop, but sometimes it returns \"pid is not a child of this shell\". sometimes, i

Answer 1

If you're running this in a container of some sort, the condition apparently can be caused by a bug in bash that is easier to encounter in a containerized envrionment.

From my reading of the bash source (specifically see comments around RECYCLES_PIDS and CHILD_MAX in bash-4.2/jobs.c), it looks like in their effort to optimize their tracking of background jobs, they leave themselves vulnerable to PID aliasing (where a new process might obscure the status of an old one); to mitigate that, they prune their background process history (apparently as mandated by POSIX?). If you should happen to want to wait on a pruned process, the shell can't find it in the history and assumes this to mean that it never knew about it (i.e., that it "is not a child of this shell").

Answer 2

Just find the process id of the process you want to wait for and replace that with 12345 in below script. Further changes can be made as per your requirement.

#!/bin/sh
PID=12345
while [ -e /proc/$PID ]
do
    echo "Process: $PID is still running" >> /home/parv/waitAndRun.log
    sleep .6
done
echo "Process $PID has finished" >> /home/parv/waitAndRun.log

/usr/bin/waitingScript.sh

http://iamparv.blogspot.in/2013/10/unix-wait-for-running-process-not-child.html

Answer 3

Either your while loop or the for loop runs in a subshell, which is why you cannot await a child of the (parent, outer) shell.

Edit this might happen if the while loop or for loop is actually

(a) in a {...} block (b) participating in a piper (e.g. for....done|somepipe)