On Fri, May 04, 2012 at 12:41:03PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote: > i wish there was a way to use `wait` that didn't block until all the pids > returned. maybe a dedicated option, or a shopt to enable this, or a new > command.
wait takes arguments. > for example, if i launched 10 jobs in the background, i usually want to wait > for the first one to exit so i can queue up another one, not wait for all of > them. Do you mean "for *any* one of them", or literally "for the first one"? The latter, you can do right now -- just pass the PID of the first one. The former would require that you set up a SIGCHLD trap and do some work. By the way, "help wait" is misleading; it says you can only pass a single job ID argument. The man page indicates that you can pass multiple arguments.
