Capturing output of asynchronous bash commands?

Question

Is it possible to do something like this in bash?

output=$(echo hello; sleep 10) &
pid=$!
# run some more commands
wait $pid
echo $output

I would like to run multiple commands in parallel, capturing their output. I'd like to do it in a "clean" way - not writing to temporary files etc.

probably try reading from the stdout files fd = 1 of the from /proc/<process_id>/fd/1 — phoxis
– phoxis, Commented Aug 25, 2011 at 18:07

bobah · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-25 18:06:33Z

3

You can use a named pipe to communicate between parent and child, see man mkfifo for details. Parent can use read command to fetch data from the pipe.

answered Aug 25, 2011 at 18:06

bobah

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1 Comment

Sam Brightman Over a year ago

There are some subtleties to how you collect the processes too, see stackoverflow.com/a/26240420/2492.

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