Re: wait unblocks before signals processed

[Elliott Forney]

Of course, this code probably also has a race condition around
--nrunning which makes it even less usable.

Thanks,
-------
Elliott Forney                        E-Mail: idfah@cs.colosetate.edu

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Elliott Forney <elliott.forney@gmail.com> wrote:
> While trying to modify some code I found on an earlier post for
> running N jobs in parallel I came across the interesting behavior
> illustrated below.  It appears that the wait command proceeds before
> my SIGUSR's are all processed.  Is this a bug or just a fact of life?
> I understand that it isn't possible to know if a process will receive
> a signal in the future but I am surprised that the signals aren't
> received and processed in time in this case.
>
> On a related note, I think it would be very nice if there were a way
> to wait for ANY background job to finish.  Currently it seems like one
> can only wait for either ALL jobs or else a single job with a given
> PID.  Would it be possible to have something like 'wait -' that would
> block until any of the current background jobs completes?  This would
> make writing simple parallel loops much easier.  The busy-wait/SIGUSR
> solution is kindof a hack and for such a simple problem I would prefer
> not to depend on gnu parallel.
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> nrunning=0
> nmax=3
>
> function job_wrap
> {
>   echo "sleeping: $2 nrunning: $nrunning"
>   eval "$@"
>   kill -s USR2 $$
> }
>
> trap ': $(( --nrunning ))' USR2
> for x in {1..20}
> do
>   while [[ nrunning -ge nmax ]]
>   do
>     : # busy wait
>   done
>
>   : $(( ++nrunning ))
>   job_wrap sleep $(( RANDOM % 3 )) &
> done
>
> echo 'start wait'
> wait
> trap - USR2
> echo 'end wait'
>
> $ ./par_sigusr
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 1
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 2
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 1 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 0 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 1 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 1 nrunning: 3
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> start wait
> sleeping: 2 nrunning: 3
> end wait
> $ ./par_sigusr: line 10: kill: (16287) - No such process
> ./par_sigusr: line 10: kill: (16287) - No such process
>
> Thanks!
> -------
> Elliott Forney