Package: procps Version: 1:3.2.7-5 Severity: wishlist Every now and then, you want to wait for some process to finish before starting another. As long as you are in the same shell that is usually not a problem. But when the process belongs to another session or user, it won't work. That's when I'd like to see a tool like pbusywait expensive-process && start-my-expensive-process it could also be used like pbusywait daemon-i-started-earlier && notify-me-it-has-crashed to allow for some cheap 'command line monitoring' convenience.
I'm aware that (at least without help from the process owner or pid 1) this isn't possible without busy waiting, i.e. polling if the process still exists. I'm also aware that there are potential race conditions here when a new process would get the same PID assigned while the polling process is still waiting. Still it would be really useful to me. Here's what I'm using right now: --- #!/bin/sh pid=`pgrep -of [EMAIL PROTECTED] if [ -z "$pid" ]; then echo "No pid found." >&2 exit 2 fi echo "Waiting for pid $pid." while test -d "/proc/$pid"; do sleep .1 done # Make sure it's gone... test -d "/proc/$pid" || exit 1 exit 1 --- Note the use of -o -- I'd otherwise see two shell processes of my busywaitpid script. Which is one of the huge benefits of using pgrep instead of "ps | grep". So I'd love to see a pbusywait command which knows how to handle this. For reasons of shared functionality, code and shared parameters, it would probably make sense to integrate this with pgrep/pkill. Probably less than 1k overhead? --- System information. --- Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux 2.6.23-1-686 Debian Release: lenny/sid 500 unstable www.debian-multimedia.org 500 unstable ftp.de.debian.org 1 experimental ftp.de.debian.org --- Package information. --- Depends (Version) | Installed ============================-+-============= libc6 (>= 2.6.1-1) | 2.7-5 libncurses5 (>= 5.6) | 5.6+20071215-1 lsb-base (>= 3.0-10) | 3.1-24 best regards, Erich Schubert -- erich@(vitavonni.de|debian.org) -- GPG Key ID: 4B3A135C (o_ A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know. //\ Zwei Freunde müssen sich im Herzen ähneln, in allem anderen V_/_ können sie grundverschieden sein. --- Sully Prudhomme