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I want to do the following from a Windows batch script:
start proc1.exe
start proc2.exe
...
start procN.exe
<wait for all N processes to complete> <-- What do I put here?
How do I wait for all spawned processes to complete?
880
You can use batch scripts to run multiple commands and instructions on your machine simultaneously. Using a batch script, you will be able to execute all your commands one by one automatically.
Try using the conditional execution & or the && between each command either with a copy and paste into the cmd.exe window or in a batch file. Additionally, you can use the double pipe || symbols instead to only run the next command if the previous command failed.
To create a Windows batch file, follow these steps: Open a text file, such as a Notepad or WordPad document. Add your commands, starting with @echo [off], followed by, each in a new line, title [title of your batch script], echo [first line], and pause. Save your file with the file extension BAT, for example, test.
This is ugly, but you could wrap each command in another batch file that runs the command and then signals that the command is complete. Your main batch file would call each of those batch files asynchronously and sit in a loop waiting for the signals.
For example:
main.bat
start cmd /c proc1.bat
start cmd /c proc2.bat
:wait
sleep 1
IF NOT EXIST proc1done GOTO wait
IF NOT EXIST proc2done GOTO wait
del proc1done
del proc2done
echo All processes are complete
proc1.bat
proc1.exe
echo Done > proc1done
The sleep command is available in Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. If you don't have that, you could use a ping on localhost just to slow down that tight loop.
71
I found a good solution in using an alternative shell called "Yori". You can read more about it and download it from http://www.malsmith.net/yori/. Yori is open source and its code repository is at https://github.com/malxau/yori.
Yori makes it easy to implement parallel process execution and wait for them to finish. In essence, what you need to do is to start the different sub-processes as so-called "jobs" and then use the internal command "wait" to wait for them to finish. You can start any process as a job by adding the special characters "&!" at the end of the command. Something like this:
ping localhost &!
ping someotherhost &!
wait
You can put your Yori-dependent commands in a separate batch-file (with the Yori-batch extension ".ys1") and invoke that from your Windows-batch for example with the following command:
echo Let Yori do the parallel execution of some lengthy operations...
start /wait /b /belownormal yori.exe -c "your-yori-script.ys1"
echo All the lengthy operations are finished, continue with the next steps...
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