How difficult would it be to add an optional timeout argument to the "wait" builtin?
I occasionally run into situations where this functionality is desirable, more often than I expect, really. And though the last thing Bash needs is an additional feature, naively it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult. E.g. "read" already has a timeout feature. But I looked into the code, and all the variations and implementations of "wait" map reasonably directly into one or another of the Posix "wait" calls. I'm no expert there, but I tried looking and there doesn't seem to be any version of those that allows the program to specify a timeout time. I considered setting an alarm() before calling wait() but a quick look on Stack Overflow said that is a good way to lose the status information from child jobs. Dale
