Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

I'm running 4 jobs in the background and I need to write the start and end times to a log file. I know there's probably a simple way to do this but, I can't think of it. I've used nohup <script name> & but, that doesn't record the times. Is there a way to get the start and end times of a background process? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Is there any way that you can modify the background jobs? Are they scripts as well? If they are, just add a line at the beginning and at the end to show the date. This will get reflected in your scripts' logs. Otherwise, have a script that runs immediately after the jobs start and uses 'ps -ef' to get the start times. The end time is probably the last time the script log was written to.

I would write a wrapper:
#! /usr/bin/ksh
exec >/some/log/file 2>&1
echo job started $(date)
/path/to/job
stat=$?
echo job finished $(date) with exit code $stat
exit 0

then just invoke the wrapper script.