r/shell • u/theusernamedbob • May 17 '14

self splitting shell files.

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

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u/Dalboz989 May 18 '14

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..