On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 09:59:51AM -0500, Chet Ramey wrote: > On 11/13/18 4:28 AM, Christopher Jefferson wrote: > > Consider the following script. While the 3 sleeps are running, both jobs > > -p and $(jobs -p) will print 3 PIDs. Once the 3 children are finished, > > jobs -p will continue to print the 3 PIDs of the done Children, but > > $(jobs -p) will only print 1 PID. $(jobs -p) always seems to print at > > most 1 PID of a done child. > > Since the $(jobs -p) is run in a subshell, its knowledge of its parent's > jobs is transient. In this case, the subshell deletes knowledge of the > jobs it inherits from its parent, but hangs onto the last asynchronous job > in case the subshell references $!. > > Chet
If the goal is to obtain the result of "jobs -p" and use it in a script, I would suggest redirecting the output of jobs -p to a temp file, then reading it. That skips the subshell.