Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello,

I am running GNU bash, version 3.2.39(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). I have a specific question pertaining to waiting on jobs run in sub-shells, based on the max number of parallel processes I want to allow, and then wait for the remaining sub-shell jobs to finish before the next step is executed in the pipeline (if I am making proper sense here)..
Essentially,my pseudo code looks like this:

Code:

MAX_PROCS=3
    for (( k = 0 ; $k < $kmerlen ; k += 1 ))
    do
    (
     ### Running a perl script here for each k (this script is a memory hog)...
    )&
    while [ $(ps -e | grep 'perlScriptAbove' | grep -v grep | wc -l) -gt ${MAX_PROCS} ] ; 
    do
             wait
    done

    done

###wait <- works fine without this wait, but I need all kmerlen jobs to finish first to proceed to the next part of the pipeline
## Run the rest of the pipeline...

The first wait statement in the while loop works fine spawning 3 jobs, but when I use the next wait statement, that property is lost, and the number of sub-shells spawned are equal to my kmerlen.

Thanks for any pointers that you can provide.

BASH allows you to wait for one specific process via wait PID but doesn't allow you to wait for N random processes. So you'll need to keep a list, and wait in order.