Re: wait -n misses signaled subprocess

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/30/24 10:14 AM, Steven Pelley wrote:
> > OK. Can you think of a use case that would break if wait -n looked at
> > terminated processes?
>
> Yes.  If one were to start a number of bg jobs and repeatedly send the
> list of pids to wait -n (probably redirecting stderr to /dev/null to
> ignore messages about unknown jobs) today you'd process the jobs one
> at a time, assuming no races between job completion.  If wait -n
> looked at terminated processes you'd return jobs repeatedly and
> possibly end up in an infinite loop.

OK, that argues for a new option to provide this functionality.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature