That's because you are waiting for the first child before anything else. You can try plain "wait", but that doesn't return until ALL children have completed.

What you can do is set up a wait-loop, and then set up a signal handler to call "jobs" or check on the specific status of any jobs; and set up an alarm-like thingy to wake up the signal handler. The wait call then gets pre-empted. So for instance, something like this (untested) in bash might work:

Code:

job1 & 
job2 &

# turn off immeidate job notification
set +b

# trap USR1 signal with null action
trap test USR1

# set up an alarm
{ sleep 1; kill -USR1 $$; } &
# disown so it does not show up in job table
# (with other shells, this can be emulated by starting it as its own session leader)
disown $!   # acts differently in ksh

# keep waiting till all jobs are complete
while ! wait; do 
   DONE=`jobs -n | sed -n '/ Done / s/^\[\([0-9]*\)\].*/\1/p'`
   if [ -n "$DONE" ]; then 
      echo -n "Jobs $DONE were completed at " 
      date
   fi
   # restart timer
   { sleep 1; kill -USR1 $$ ; } &
   disown $!
done

When wait exits with 0, there are no remaining background tasks, and the loop terminates. If you don't have bash, but have "setsid", you can effectively disown a process that way.