Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm not sure - sleep without an argument sleeps forever (until a signal comes in). So the intent of the statement is - if we have too many processes, pause. When SIGCHLD comes in, we are awakened, and control falls out of the if and (finally) starts the new process. If we don't have too many processes yet, just start a new process directly.

With an "else", wouldn't the case where we sleep then skip starting its process when it awakens?

Paul.

Why not take your original concept and build in a throttle, e.g.:

Code:

par=10
offset=$(ps|wc -l)
max=$(( par + offset ))
for i in *.gz
do
  # echo starting new process
  gunzip "$i" &
  while [ $(ps|wc -l) -ge $max ]
  do
     # echo "Throttling..."
     sleep 1
  done
done
wait