Get exit code of a background process

Question

1: In bash, $! holds the PID of the last background process that was executed. That will tell you what process to monitor, anyway.

4: wait <n> waits until the process with PID <n> is complete (it will block until the process completes, so you might not want to call this until you are sure the process is done), and then returns the exit code of the completed process.

2, 3: ps or ps | grep " $! " can tell you whether the process is still running. It is up to you how to understand the output and decide how close it is to finishing. (ps | grep isn't idiot-proof. If you have time you can come up with a more robust way to tell whether the process is still running).

Here's a skeleton script:

# simulate a long process that will have an identifiable exit code
(sleep 15 ; /bin/false) &
my_pid=$!

while   ps | grep " $my_pid "     # might also need  | grep -v grep  here
do
    echo $my_pid is still in the ps output. Must still be running.
    sleep 3
done

echo Oh, it looks like the process is done.
wait $my_pid
# The variable $? always holds the exit code of the last command to finish.
# Here it holds the exit code of $my_pid, since wait exits with that code. 
my_status=$?
echo The exit status of the process was $my_status

This is how I solved it when I had a similar need:

# Some function that takes a long time to process
longprocess() {
        # Sleep up to 14 seconds
        sleep $((RANDOM % 15))
        # Randomly exit with 0 or 1
        exit $((RANDOM % 2))
}

pids=""
# Run five concurrent processes
for i in {1..5}; do
        ( longprocess ) &
        # store PID of process
        pids+=" $!"
done

# Wait for all processes to finish, will take max 14s
# as it waits in order of launch, not order of finishing
for p in $pids; do
        if wait $p; then
                echo "Process $p success"
        else
                echo "Process $p fail"
        fi
done

The pid of a backgrounded child process is stored in $!. You can store all child processes' pids into an array, e.g. PIDS[].

wait [-n] [jobspec or pid …]

Wait until the child process specified by each process ID pid or job specification jobspec exits and return the exit status of the last command waited for. If a job spec is given, all processes in the job are waited for. If no arguments are given, all currently active child processes are waited for, and the return status is zero. If the -n option is supplied, wait waits for any job to terminate and returns its exit status. If neither jobspec nor pid specifies an active child process of the shell, the return status is 127.

Use wait command you can wait for all child processes finish, meanwhile you can get exit status of each child processes via $? and store status into STATUS[]. Then you can do something depending by status.

I have tried the following 2 solutions and they run well. solution01 is more concise, while solution02 is a little complicated.

solution01

#!/bin/bash

# start 3 child processes concurrently, and store each pid into array PIDS[].
process=(a.sh b.sh c.sh)
for app in ${process[@]}; do
  ./${app} &
  PIDS+=($!)
done

# wait for all processes to finish, and store each process's exit code into array STATUS[].
for pid in ${PIDS[@]}; do
  echo "pid=${pid}"
  wait ${pid}
  STATUS+=($?)
done

# after all processed finish, check their exit codes in STATUS[].
i=0
for st in ${STATUS[@]}; do
  if [[ ${st} -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "$i failed"
  else
    echo "$i finish"
  fi
  ((i+=1))
done

solution02

#!/bin/bash

# start 3 child processes concurrently, and store each pid into array PIDS[].
i=0
process=(a.sh b.sh c.sh)
for app in ${process[@]}; do
  ./${app} &
  pid=$!
  PIDS[$i]=${pid}
  ((i+=1))
done

# wait for all processes to finish, and store each process's exit code into array STATUS[].
i=0
for pid in ${PIDS[@]}; do
  echo "pid=${pid}"
  wait ${pid}
  STATUS[$i]=$?
  ((i+=1))
done

# after all processed finish, check their exit codes in STATUS[].
i=0
for st in ${STATUS[@]}; do
  if [[ ${st} -ne 0 ]]; then
    echo "$i failed"
  else
    echo "$i finish"
  fi
  ((i+=1))
done

#/bin/bash

#pgm to monitor
tail -f /var/log/messages >> /tmp/log&
# background cmd pid
pid=$!
# loop to monitor running background cmd
while :
do
    ps ax | grep $pid | grep -v grep
    ret=$?
    if test "$ret" != "0"
    then
        echo "Monitored pid ended"
        break
    fi
    sleep 5

done

wait $pid
echo $?

As I see almost all answers use external utilities (mostly ps) to poll the state of the background process. There is a more unixesh solution, catching the SIGCHLD signal. In the signal handler it has to be checked which child process was stopped. It can be done by kill -0 <PID> built-in (universal) or checking the existence of /proc/<PID> directory (Linux specific) or using the jobs built-in (bash specific. jobs -l also reports the pid. In this case the 3rd field of the output can be Stopped|Running|Done|Exit . ).

Here is my example.

The launched process is called loop.sh. It accepts -x or a number as an argument. For -x is exits with exit code 1. For a number it waits num*5 seconds. In every 5 seconds it prints its PID.

The launcher process is called launch.sh:

#!/bin/bash

handle_chld() {
    local tmp=()
    for((i=0;i<${#pids[@]};++i)); do
        if [ ! -d /proc/${pids[i]} ]; then
            wait ${pids[i]}
            echo "Stopped ${pids[i]}; exit code: $?"
        else tmp+=(${pids[i]})
        fi
    done
    pids=(${tmp[@]})
}

set -o monitor
trap "handle_chld" CHLD

# Start background processes
./loop.sh 3 &
pids+=($!)
./loop.sh 2 &
pids+=($!)
./loop.sh -x &
pids+=($!)

# Wait until all background processes are stopped
while [ ${#pids[@]} -gt 0 ]; do echo "WAITING FOR: ${pids[@]}"; sleep 2; done
echo STOPPED

For more explanation see: Starting a process from bash script failed