Pause bash script until signal of another one - bash

Question

What is the shortest way to sleep a bash script at a certain location until another script wakes it up to continue it's job?
Mayby using flock -u .. or blocking read on a pipe ?

Answer 1

Say scriptA sleeps and waits for being waken up by scriptB.
One way is, in A, before you sleep, write the pid to some file say scriptA.pid then falling in sleep.
When B is running, at the right moment, you can read the scriptA.pid file, to get the pid of A, then do pkill -P pidofA sleep thus, the sleep sub-process will be killed, and A will continue its execution.

Answer 2

I'm a fan of named pipes (fifo). scriptA.sh:
pipe='/tmp/mypipe'
mkfifo "$pipe"
echo "$0 going to sleep..."
# Should block
read < "$pipe"
echo "$0 continuing"
scriptB.sh
pipe='/tmp/mypipe'
mkfifo "$pipe"
echo "$0 waking other process"
# might block
echo > "$pipe"
echo "$0 exiting"
You will get a mkfifo: /tmp/mypipe: File exists from the second mkfifo, if that bothers you then test for existence first (-e "$pipe"). This does not tidy-up (rm) the fifo, not sure where that should go because timing of the application is critical to where you put that.

Answer 3

You could use the inter process signals: the kill command should be used to send a signal to a process using its pid.
The SIGSTOP signal stops the execution of the process.
The SIGCONT signal resumes the process execution.
The example script below:
stores the pid of the process in a file.
the script sends to its own process the SIGSTOP signal ($$ is the pid of the current bash process).
Hopefully, another process will resume the execution.
Give a try to this:
#!/bin/bash --
printf "%s" $$ > /tmp/aScript.pid
kill -STOP $$ # STOP the execution here
# execution continues here when the SIGCONT signal is received
printf "script %s: received the SIGCONT signal\n" $$
Test in a terminal:
$ ./aScript.sh &
[1] 26444
$ kill -CONT $(cat /tmp/aScript.pid)
script 26444: received the SIGCONT signal

Answer 4

1st method
The running script can stop itself -
$: cat flagfile
#!/usr/bin/bash
echo $$ > /tmp/flagfile.pid
kill -STOP $$
date
$: ./flagfile &
[1] 24679
$: ps -fu $LOGNAME | grep 'flagfile$'
P2759474 24679 24521 0 13:29 pts/0 00:00:00 /usr/bin/bash ./flagfile
[1]+ Stopped ./flagfile
Then any other script can restart it.
$: kill -CONT $(</tmp/flagfile.pid)
$: Wed Dec 12 13:36:01 CST 2018
That last line gave me back a prompt before the background process managed to output the date. :)
2nd method
If a delay is ok, you can have a trap break it out.
This isn't totally stopping the script, but you can set the delay and make it as freindly as you have leeway to wait for it to wake up.
$: cat flagfile
#!/usr/bin/bash
trap 'loop=0' USR1
loop=1
delay=2
echo $$ > /tmp/flagfile.pid
while (( loop )); do sleep $delay; done
date
$: ./flagfile &
[1] 25018
$: ps -fu $LOGNAME | grep 'flagfile$'
P2759474 25018 24521 0 13:42 pts/0 00:00:00 /usr/bin/bash ./flagfile
Wait as long as you like....
$: kill -USR1 $(</tmp/flagfile.pid)
$: Wed Dec 12 13:42:43 CST 2018
[1]+ Done ./flagfile