jobs control in a /bin/sh script

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

Hi,

Is there a way to redirect "jobs" output?
While this works on other bourne-like shells like zsh
or bash, it doesn't on /bin/sh.

$ sleep 100 &
$ sleep 100 &
$ jobs -p
1760
1761
$ jobs -p | cat
$
for j in $jobs
do
(
blah; blah; blah;
) &
done

and I'd like to limit the number of jobs my script could create.

Thanks,
Nikos

[Polytropon]

Post by Nikos Vassiliadis
Hi,
Is there a way to redirect "jobs" output?
While this works on other bourne-like shells like zsh
or bash, it doesn't on /bin/sh.

$ sleep 100 &
$ sleep 100 &
$ jobs -p
1760
1761
$ jobs -p | cat
$
for j in $jobs
do
(
blah; blah; blah;
) &
done

and I'd like to limit the number of jobs my script could create.

How about this?

JOBS=`jobs -p`
for j in $JOBS; do
# ... whatever you need to do with $j ...
done

Or the iteration just shortened:

for j in `jobs -p`; do
# ... whatever you need to do with $j ...
done

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

Post by Polytropon
JOBS=`jobs -p`

Thank you, that would do what I want. It's rather strange that
the other construct doesn't work. But this workaround would do:)

Thanks,
Nikos

[Polytropon]

Post by Nikos Vassiliadis

Post by Polytropon
JOBS=`jobs -p`

Thank you, that would do what I want. It's rather strange that
the other construct doesn't work. But this workaround would do:)

In case of a shell script, calling the "jobs" command will invoke
an internal (shell builtin) command, and this one seems to be
unable to use redirection. There also is the /usr/bin/jobs binary,
but it doesn't seem to work as desired in the scripting context...