Wait for one of two processes in shell script - shell

I am running a couple of background processes in my shell script. I want to exit the script when one of the two processes exit.
If I apply:
wait $PID1
wait $PID2
It'll will wait for process 1 to complete and then wait for process 2. Same happens for:
command 1 && command 2 && wait
Is there any way I could perform an or operation on the wait command?

You can trap SIGCHLD:
trap 'exit 0' SIGCHLD

Related

Handling signals in bash script when it started as a background process

Okay, I have a script like this:
trap 'echo "CTRL-C signal was caught!" ' SIGINT
for ((i=0; i<15; i++))
do
sleep 3
done
When I start my script in a usual way, it immediately reacts to CTRL-C command and echo "CTRL-C signal was caught!", even if there is a sleep 3 command. But when I run my script as a background process, it waits until sleep 3 command is finished, and then echo "CTRL-C signal was caught!"
I do not understand this. I think trap should wait until previous command is finished, and then it should echo something, like when it started as a background process.
Bash manual states:
Background processes (...) are immune to keyboard-generated signals.
If bash is waiting for a command to complete and receives a signal for which a trap has been set, the trap will not be executed until the command completes.
Consequently:
If your script runs in the foreground: when you press "Ctrl-C", a SIGINT is sent to the currently running process (i.e. the sleep command). The exit status of sleep tells Bash that it was interrupted by the SIGINT signal and bash calls your trap.
If your script runs in the background, then the backgrounded sleep does not receive the signal and the SIGINT trap is only executed once sleep has ended.

SIGINT propagation for background process vs for subshell

I have two programs in two files that I run with bash:
The first:
(sleep 100) &
wait
The second:
sleep 100 &
wait
If I send a SIGINT to the first program, it also kills my sleep command. But for the second the sleep command remains and isn't killed.
Why the difference?
Thanks so much!

Bash files: run process in parallel and stop when one is over

I would like to start two C codes from a bash file in parallel and the second one stops when the first one has finished.
The instruction wait expects both processes to stop which is not what I would like to do.
Thanks for any suggestion.
GNU parallel can do this kind of job. Check termination section, it can shutdown down remaining processes based on the exit code (either success or failure:
parallel -j2 --halt now,success=1 ::: 'cmd1 args' 'cmd2 args'
When one of the job finishes successfully, it will send TERM signal to the other jobs (if jobs are not terminated it forces using KILL signal).
With $! you get the pid of the last command executed in parallel. See some nice examples here: Bash `wait` command, waiting for more than 1 PID to finish execution
For your peculiar problem I imagine something like:
#!/bin/bash
command_master() {
echo -e "Command_master"
sleep 1
}
command_tokill() {
echo -e "Command_tokill"
sleep 10
}
command_master & pid_master=($!)
command_tokill & pid_tokill=($!)
wait "$pid_master"
kill "$pid_tokill"
wait -n is what you are looking for. It waits for the next job to finish. You can then have a list of the PIDs of the remaining jobs with jobs -p if you want to kill them.
prog1 & pids=( $! )
prog2 & pids+=( $! )
wait -n
kill "${pids[#]}"
This requires bash.
The two programs are started as background jobs, and the shell waits for one of them to exit.
When this happens, kill is used to terminate both processes (this will cause an error since one of them is already dead).

How can I run a program until the user presses ctrl+c in bash?

I am trying to write a bash script in which I require to run a binary and if I press Ctrl+c then along with script, binary which is running in background should also be stopped. I am trying this code but it does not help:
#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/local/path-to-binary
./testBinary
read input
if (( "$input" == "Ctrl+c")); then
ps -aef|grep Binary
pkill -9 Binary
There a several errors in your script. Check the comments below your question.
Here is an example how to launch a background process and kill it on Ctrl+c:
#!/bin/bash
# Register signal handler for SIGINT (Ctrl+c)
trap abort INT
function abort() {
echo "Sending SIGINT to background process ${pid}"
# Kill background process
kill "${pid}"
# Wait for it to finish after killing it
wait "${pid}"
# Exit the script
echo "Aborting"
exit 1
}
# Start long running process in background (&)
sleep 1000 &
# Obtain the pid of that process
pid=$!
# Wait for the background process to finish
wait
PS: Just run the script and press Ctrl+c. read is not required.

WAIT for "1 of many process" to finish

Is there any built in feature in bash to wait for 1 out of many processes to finish? And then kill remaining processes?
pids=""
# Run five concurrent processes
for i in {1..5}; do
( longprocess ) &
# store PID of process
pids+=" $!"
done
if [ "one of them finished" ]; then
kill_rest_of_them;
fi
I'm looking for "one of them finished" command. Is there any?
bash 4.3 added a -n flag to the built-in wait command, which causes the script to wait for the next child to complete. The -p option to jobs also means you don't need to store the list of pids, as long as there aren't any background jobs that you don't want to wait on.
# Run five concurrent processes
for i in {1..5}; do
( longprocess ) &
done
wait -n
kill $(jobs -p)
Note that if there is another background job other than the 5 long processes that completes first, wait -n will exit when it completes. That would also mean you would still want to save the list of process ids to kill, rather than killing whatever jobs -p returns.
It's actually fairly easy:
#!/bin/bash
set -o monitor
killAll()
{
# code to kill all child processes
}
# call function to kill all children on SIGCHLD from the first one
trap killAll SIGCHLD
# start your child processes here
# now wait for them to finish
wait
You just have to be really careful in your script to use only bash built-in commands. You can't start any utilities that run as a separate process after you issue the trap command - any child process exiting will send SIGCHLD - and you can't tell where it came from.

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