How can I wait for PID to finish in another shell

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

Have a need to schedule programs that can run after other programs are completed. Here's the catch:

1) The list of programs will not always be the same (kind of a plug-n-play deal)
2) The invoking shell may not be the same as the shell of the program being waited on

In other words, I need to be able to wait on PID's from other shells in the same Unix box. I've looked through Unix in a Nutshell & Power Tools and found nothing.

Any advice?

2

Just loop checking to see if the process is still running. If so, sleep for ten seconds and loop again. If not continue.

3

This is a script I wrote a long time ago and have been using since (not sure how widespread pgrep is, but this works in Solaris).

#!/bin/bash

# Variables
PROCESS=""      # This is what you want to page on
MAILTO=""         # Space delmited list of email addresses
HOSTNAME=`hostname`
A=1

 # Processing
until [ ${A} -eq 2 ]; do
   pgrep -f "${PROCESS}" >/dev/null 2>&1
   if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        sleep 300
        else sleep 30
        pgrep -f "${PROCESS}" >/dev/null 2>&1
        FLAG=$?
        if [ ${FLAG} ! -eq 0 ]
           then echo "$PROCESS is no longer running on ${HOSTNAME}" | mailx -s "
${PROCESS}" ${MAILTO}
           A=2
           exit 0
        fi
   fi
done

It checks that a process is running every 5 minutes. If it goes away, it waits 30 seconds and checks one last time to make sure.

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for, but you should be able to modify it to work (sorry, I have been at work too long today to do it).