I am hoping someone can help me out here.

I have a function which acts as a job submission that is automatically sent as a background job. I would like the return of the job to represent what a user actually type in a command line but as of now it returns the literal function.

For example:

function hello() { echo "Hello $1" & }

when I issue the command:hello MyName

at completion I get

[1]+ Done echo "Hello $1"

What I would like to see is

[1]+ Done hello MyName


without having to issue a command

hello MyName &


Thank you for your help!

That's because a background job can't get input and post output. Read man page of bash.

When a background job finishes.... you get a response back which includes the command you issue

if I have the following function

function hello() { echo "Hello $1" & ;}

and I issue the command

hello MyName &

I get: [1]+ Done hello MyName

what I would like to do is put this behavior into the function

sorry typo before

function hello() { echo "Hello $1" ;}

Do you want to make this function executable in sub processes?

If then pass:

So the whole background on this is that our users kick off certain jobs and continue to work. These happen to be jobs for SAS which may take varying lengths.

so they submit a job through a command like sas program.sas and their job is submitted and they continue to do their other work.
In the process they may submit many jobs but when a job is done they are going to be prompted. The users would like to see which job finished.

so I have a function that looks similar to this
function sas () { /opt/local/bin/sas94 "$@" &}

they submit
sas program1.sas
sas program2.sas

As soon as the first program is done X minutes later they get this:

[1]+ Done /opt/local/bin/sas94 "$@"

This isnt informative of what just finished


If they were to do

sas program1.sas &
sas program2.sas &

they get assuming the first one finished, giving more meaningful information

[1]+ Done /opt/local/bin/sas94 program1.sas

So I am trying to figure out what I am missing in my function so they don't always need to add & to push a job in background and get this result.

In the past we had another environment csh where I could just do this in an alias and I would get the proper return. In bash it seems I need to get into a function to be able to pass the program parameter and im kind of stuck. Sorry I am really a SAS programmer not so much a Linux guy...

Probably this:
?