Hi,

sometimes I run a script or program which takes a while to run (like compiling something). Half through, I realise that I would like to run a command afterwards (say, reboot or beep). Had I realised earlier, I could have done

cmd1 ; reboot

But if it's already running, is there anyway to tag on subsequent commands? I mean, it is possible to pause it with a CTRL-Z in the bash shell.

If not, I may try writing an app that I can run in the CTRL-Z space, like checkApp cmd1 -[cmd2 cmd3] & ( ; fg 1), which greps ps -ef to see if cmd1 is still running, and if not run cmd2, cmd3 etc. Perhaps one exists though?

Does something like this already exist, or is there a way of tagging on subsequent commands?

Thank you for your time.

---EDIT
by Jojo http://www.votelinux.com/tips/144-Re...ram-is-running
Here is a little bash script which will monitor the status of any process. Just call it with the processname (or a part of it) and it will loop endlessly unless the given process has quit.
This is very useful to monitor the status of daemons on a server

#!/bin/bash

while ps ax | grep -v -e grep -e [scriptFileName] | grep -q $1 ; do
echo "Programm $1 running"
sleep 1
done
------

A simple way to do this, is:
1) Stop the command execution with Ctrl-Z
2) Put it in background with command bg
3) Type the following command and press enter
The wait command is a shell builtin that waits for a process to accomplish its task and return the exit command of that process (see man bash for details). The $! means "last background process". So, after you have put the command in background you wait for its completion and when the command has successfully completed the command after && is executed. More difficult to explain than to do!

Isn't that "!$"?

because I know that if I do I will edit foo.

Also, I can run a command, then halfway into it just type the next command and push Return and it will run the second command when the other one is finished.

It is a really different thing:
$! takes the "last background job"
!$ takes the "last word of the previous command"
As you can see they are totally unrelated.

Oh, this is juicy stuff! I knew about using $! but not the other one. Perhaps one of you can help with a related question. How do you 'fish' for variables deaclared before the last command, or before the current process?
What I mean is, I start a process like this:

VAR=SomeValue program-name

program-name is a BASH script of course. How can find out what was given before
program-name on the command-line?


Here's the way I use $!

That makes a nice little CLI progress-bar (green) with a rotating star-looking cursor

Ah yes, my mistake.

That looks interesting, gnashley, but how exactly do you call it? Does that program take the place of $!?

prog-name is the program that gets its' progress tracked with a bar. It must be backgrounded like: 'prog-name &'. Then when calling the function rotdash2, the &! makes it attach the last background process to the rotdash2 program. BTW, that code is mostly credited to Klaus Knopper -I just had to do some minor changes in the escape characters or something for use with BASH. The original code was for ash-knoppix.

How does it know how far the program is into? Also I see a strange symbols at the '\E[32;40m/' last character of each of those statments.

Thanks

$! is the process id fed to p=$1
while [ -d /proc/$p ] tracks the exisitng of the process
all the echoes can be replaced by a simple sleep if you just want poll
to see if the process is running. Be sure to sleep or do something in the loop or you have a run-away process.

Those funny characters are BS (back-spaces). Whats the escape sequence for that? Wait, I've been playing with that, look at the edited code above.
echo -e \E[B backups one character. Using \E[b backs up and repeats the prvious char?

I don't get it !?!?!
if you type in a command after something has started running it will run afterwards anyway.

the keyboard doesn't turn off when a command runs.