UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

The background job will continue to run.

I didn't script an error path, since that's a whole other conversation entirely. But as a rule, the background job should be killed.

Code:

echo "Terminating job '$PID'."
kill $PID && sleep 1
ps $PID && kill -9 $PID && sleep 1
ps $PID 2>&1 && echo "Job did not die!" || echo "Job terminated."

Of course, the error path from the loop should also clean up any temp files, stop any other background processes, log some diagnostic info, terminate the script, etc.

Ideally you would create a trap that would kill the background job(s) if the script exited or was killed. But that is a separate issue.

On the Unixes I use, "ps $PID" will return non-zero when $PID is not in the process table. It may be that your Unix does not, in which case you must use some form of "ps $PID | grep" to determine if the background process has completed.

It works well now. Thanks for everyone who help me!

Or

Code:

while kill -0 $PID 2> /dev/null
do
  echo $PID still alive
done