Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I have to read a text file and start "N" number of programs
at a time in back ground.when any one of the job is completd
then i have to pass new job into that process.

How can i start Multiple jobs at a time?

How can i Track Jobs and move other jobs when one job is
completed?

Please solve my probelm....

Sounds like a homework problem. If not, what is the actual problem you are trying to solve? What languages are you open to using. ksh does have job control - see the man page for bg and jobs and environment variable such as %%, %-, %+, %# etc.

http://docsrv.caldera.com:507/en/man....html#ksh_jobs

Cheers,

Keith

I want to start multiple jobs at once and i must monitor which job
is completed trap that process Id and again i have to pass new
job to that process in back ground

Just Example psedocode of
1. Starting Multiple jobs at a time
2. Monitor the status of each job
3. When ever a job is completed pass a new job to process

That logic i want

sureshraju_ma, ksh does not have the power to implement that in a robust manner. But there are some choices available to you...

My preferred solution would be to simply use the "at" command. It already has all of this built in. You will need to customize a queue and use the -q option on the at command. See "man queuedefs" for details.

Second, you could write your own c program that behaves somewhat like the "at" command. This would give you total control over the behavior of the program. I would only do this if the "at" command proved completely unsuitable for some reason.

Third, a very similiar thing could be done in ksh. You would write a "starter" script that somehow locates a job to run. If there are no jobs, it exits. If it finds a job, it execs that job. But each job would then need to exec the starter script at completion. Then you just launch n starter scripts.

You aware of the c system calls like select and poll. you can use them for a very sturdy program.

I don't see how select() or poll() would be helpful here. Can you explain your idea more fully?

How can i use select() and poll() to solve this problem?
Details please