On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 02:15:38PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote: > Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 17:25:57 -0400 > From: Chet Ramey <chet.ra...@case.edu> > Message-ID: <322e10a6-3808-49be-aa9d-a1d367a90...@case.edu> > > | OK, here's the longer answer. When the shell is interactive, and job > | control is enabled, the shell prints job completion notifications to > | stdout at command boundaries. > > which is, IMO, yet another bogus bash misfeature. That should > happen, with the effect described, but only when PS1 is about > to be printed - precisely so commands like the one described > will work. Sigh. > > There aren't many complaints about this misfeature of bash, > as almost no-one writes interactive command lines where it makes > a difference. That doesn't mean they should not be able to.
Yeah, it appears you're right. In a script, this works as expected: hobbit:~$ cat foo #!/bin/bash for i in {0..3}; do sleep 1 & done for i in {0..3}; do wait -n -p pid; e=$? printf 'pid %s status %s\n' "$pid" "$e" done hobbit:~$ ./foo pid 530359 status 0 pid 530360 status 0 pid 530361 status 0 pid 530362 status 0 But interactively, *even with bash -c and set +m*, it just fails: hobbit:~$ bash -c 'set +m; for i in {0..3}; do sleep 1 & done; for i in {0..3}; do wait -n -p pid; e=$?; printf "pid %s status %s\n" "$pid" "$e"; done' pid 530407 status 0 pid 530410 status 0 pid status 127 pid status 127 Looks like a race condition, where some of the children get reaped and tossed away before "wait -n -p pid" has a chance to grab their status. If I stick a "sleep 2" in between the two loops, then it's even worse: hobbit:~$ bash -c 'set +m; for i in {0..3}; do sleep 1 & done; sleep 2; for i in {0..3}; do wait -n -p pid; e=$?; printf "pid %s status %s\n" "$pid" "$e"; done'pid status 127 pid status 127 pid status 127 pid status 127 ALL of the children are discarded before the second loop has a chance to catch a single one of them. This is clearly not working as expected. Using "bash +i -c" doesn't change anything, either. Or "bash +i +m -c". Whatever magic it is that you get by putting the code in an actual script, I can't figure out how to replicate it from a prompt.