Hi,

I have a shell script to refresh some databases. Currently I open 5 sessions and to execute the five scripts.

Today, as test, I tried to see if I could run two refreshes simultaneously from one session using the '&':

. /refresh.ksh db1 &
. /refresh.ksh db2

The first one ran and the second one started only after the first one was finished. Could it be that the script refresh.ksh contains many commands and those are not pushed to the background? If so, what's the best approach to getting 5 db's refresh simultanously from on session?

Thanks,
Brian

You could screen the processes, but in all likelihood you're going to have better results running them serially rather than parallel.

(REPEAT as necessary)

It's also entirely possible the database can only be doing the operations performed in that ksh file serially.

Put them on the same line.
./refresh.ksh db1 & ./refresh.ksh db2

Hi,

Will investigate the screen command. I didn't make it clear in my original post but the example I posted was targeting two different databases.

Brian

From what I know of screen (which I admit is limited) it is similar to the way DVTM works, in that it breaks up a console/terminal into "sessions" or separate sub-instances.

As mentioned above, maybe the command or operation you are doing will only work serially anyhow, because it will only refresh one DB at a time, so this may be irrelevant; but:

if you're looking for a way similar to `screen` to run multiple processes within one terminal session, look up DVTM (Dynamic virtual terminal manager) -- it acts like a tiling window manager, except it's for inside terminal environments. I've used it both in an "xterm" type of terminal emulator, and also in a VT outside of X, and it does what it claims to do.

Hope this helps, or is at least interesting

Sasha

should definitely fire off the first one into the background and immediately start the second one. I think you need to check your code and/or how you're checking for parallel running. There's nothing wrong with that code as is...

IMPORTANT: just noticed due to my copy n paste that it looks like you've got a space between the '.' and the '/'; this will cause it to source the code into the current shell, NOT what you want.
Remove the space and try again; also, post inside code tags next time please.

For what you're wanting to do, backgrounding ~should~ work. Failing that provided that the refresh.ksh can be run simotaniously (eg it doesn't block in some manner) then screening the processes will let you do that. I wrote a fairly good basic tutorial on screen a while ago.