wait for background processes in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Wait for Background Processes in Bash

📖 Scenario: You are writing a Bash script to run multiple tasks in the background. You want to make sure the script waits until all these background tasks finish before moving on.

🎯 Goal: Build a Bash script that starts two background processes and then waits for both to complete before printing a final message.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create two background processes using sleep commands

Use the wait command to pause the script until both background processes finish

Print a message after all background processes have completed

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Scripts often run multiple tasks at once to save time. Waiting ensures the script only continues after all tasks finish.

💼 Career

Knowing how to manage background processes and synchronization is important for system administrators and automation engineers.

1

Start two background processes

Create two background processes by running sleep 3 & and sleep 5 & in your script.

Bash Scripting

# Start two background sleep commands
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the & symbol after a command to run it in the background.

2

Add a wait command

Add the wait command to your script to pause execution until all background processes finish.

Bash Scripting

sleep 3 &
sleep 5 &
# Add wait command below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

The wait command waits for all background jobs to complete.

3

Print a completion message

After the wait command, add a echo statement to print "All background processes finished".

Bash Scripting

sleep 3 &
sleep 5 &
wait
# Print completion message below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo to display messages in Bash.

4

Run the script and see the output

Run the complete script and observe that it waits about 5 seconds before printing All background processes finished.

Bash Scripting

sleep 3 &
sleep 5 &
wait
echo "All background processes finished"  # Run the script to see output

Need a hint?

The script should pause until both sleep commands finish, then print the message.