Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I'm trying to write a script to decompress a directory full of files. The decompression commands can run in the background, so that many can run at once. But I want to limit the number running at any one time, so that I don't overload the machine.

Something like this:

Code:

n=0
for i in *.gz
do
    gzip -d $i &
    n=$((n+1))
    if [ $n -ge 10 ]; then
        # XXX Not sure what to do here
    fi
done

At the marked spot, I want to wait for one of my background processes to complete. I don't mind which one, but I do want to wait for just one.

wait doesn't work, as it waits for all jobs to complete. On the other hand, wait N doesn't work, because I don't know which job will finish first.

I could use trap "..." 20, but I'd need to be able to pause my script at the XXX line and be able to resume it via the "..." from the trap command. I can't think of a way of doing this ("suspend" in bash might work, but really I need this to work in ksh - I'm not sure the server this will ultimately run on has bash installed).

Can anyone suggest an approach that I could use?

Thanks,
Paul.