Task sync

[William E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <11658 at steinmetz.ge.com> I write:
| 
|   I have a problem which requires running a number of similar programs,
| then a final program. It's not a make, but the solution might be applied
| there, too.

  Well about 30 people have written to say that all I do is keep a PID
table, so I guess I didn't clarify the question very well. What I need
to do is something like the 'batch' command, in that the commands to be
run will not be started by the same processes, at least on its own.

  I need to be able to handle a number of commands, possibly from a
number of other programs, in a portable way.

  On SysV I have a kludge which reads a named pipe and when it gets a
command it either starts a process to execute it or waits for an
existing process to complete. I never worked on getting the status back
to the submitter, because I don't seem to find named pipes on all (or
even most) BSD systems.

  What I have now is more or less a daemon to run jobs, although I would
be willing to implement almost anything which will work. I certainly
don't mind having some code which is used for BSD and some for SysV, but
I don't want to use non-portable features and have every few lines be
more stuff in an ifdef.

Here's one way to use it:
	for file in *.mu
	do	runsome -3 ioproc $file
	#       ^^^^^^^  A ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	#   what I need  |    the command
	#         max to run
	done
	runwait
	^^^^^^^
	# wait for all to stop


It could also go in a make file:
	# compile three at a time
	.c.o: runsome -3 $(CC) $< -c

	prog:  $(OBJFILES)
		runwait
		cc $(LFLAGS) $(OBJFILES) -o prog


what I have now is more or less:
	pipename=`runsome 3`		# run just three
	for file in *.c
	do	echo "indent ${file}" > ${pipename}
	done
	runwait ${pipename}

  Thanks again to all who responded, I mailed thanks to all but some
bounced, and hopefully this time I have explained better.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me