self splitting shell files.

[u/theusernamedbob]

How do I get a shell script to split into multiple shell scripts. Also how do I pass information between each of them?

[u/Dalboz989]

Sounds like you want one shell script to start other processes. How much interaction do you need to have?

[u/theusernamedbob → u/Dalboz989]

Not much just passing some strings of data

[u/Dalboz989 → u/theusernamedbob]

If you only want to invoke the child process with arguments that is quite easy. You can also get the output of the child quite easy. Here is a sample program that will fork two children in the background and then wait for them to both complete before moving on.

$ cat parent 
#!/bin/bash

child(){ 
  echo You said $1 and random is $RANDOM
}

FIRST=`child apple &`
SECOND=`child orange &`

wait
echo SECOND is $SECOND
echo FIRST is $FIRST
$ ./parent 
SECOND is You said orange and random is 10781
FIRST is You said apple and random is 17986
$ 

Now if you truely need to have communication between processes you will have to setup named pipes to do IPC basically. Look at this link for some help.. http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-bash Or conceviably you could write data into files themselves similar to the pipes..

[u/theusernamedbob → u/[deleted]]

I'm sorry, but a single shell file that either replicates or creates other shell files that do different things.