I wanted to check in and see if there was a chance of this feature being accepted upstream before I spent any time on it... so here goes.
The "wait [n]" command is handy, but would be even handier is: wait [[-a] n] instead, which asynchronously checks to see if process 'n' has completed. I.e. this would be like calling waitpid() with options=WNOHANG, instead of 0. Why bother? Well, sometimes in scripts (especially /etc/init.d/ scripts) it's useful to do something like: timeout=30 interval=1 pppd ... updetach& pid=$! let -i n=0 while [ $n -lt $timeout ]; do wait -a $pid status=$? if [ $status -ne 128 ]; then break; fi sleep $interval fi if [ $status -ne 0 ]; then echo "Couldn't start PPPD or failed to connect.">&2 exit 1 fi as an example. (In this case, the original instance of pppd would have forked and detached when it successfully connected, causing the original instance to exit with 0; anything else would return non-zero.) Does this seem like a reasonable enhancement? Thanks, -Philip
