How do you run multiple programs in parallel from a bash script?
How about:
prog1 & prog2 && fgThis will:
- Start
prog1. - Send it to background, but keep printing its output.
- Start
prog2, and keep it in foreground, so you can close it withctrl-c. - When you close
prog2, you'll return toprog1's foreground, so you can also close it withctrl-c.
To run multiple programs in parallel:
prog1 &prog2 &If you need your script to wait for the programs to finish, you can add:
waitat the point where you want the script to wait for them.
If you want to be able to easily run and kill multiple process with ctrl-c, this is my favorite method: spawn multiple background processes in a (…) subshell, and trap SIGINT to execute kill 0, which will kill everything spawned in the subshell group:
(trap 'kill 0' SIGINT; prog1 & prog2 & prog3)You can have complex process execution structures, and everything will close with a single ctrl-c (just make sure the last process is run in the foreground, i.e., don't include a & after prog1.3):
(trap 'kill 0' SIGINT; prog1.1 && prog1.2 & (prog2.1 | prog2.2 || prog2.3) & prog1.3)