bash – How to Assign Environment Variables in Parallel

background-processbashenvironment-variablesparallelism

I'm trying to set several environment variables with the results from command substitution. I want to run the commands in parallel with & and wait. What I've got currently looks something like

export foo=`somecommand bar` &
export fizz=`somecommand baz` &
export rick=`somecommand morty` &
wait

But apparently when using & variable assignments don't stick. So after the wait, all those variables are unassigned.

How can I assign these variables in parallel?

UPDATE: Here's what I ended up using based off the accepted answer

declare -a data
declare -a output
declare -a processes

var_names=(
    foo
    fizz
    rick
)

for name in "${var_names[@]}"
do
    processes+=("./get_me_a_value_for $name")
done

index=0
for process in "${processes[@]}"; do
    output+=("$(mktemp)")
    ${process} > ${output[$index]} &
    index=$((index+1))
done
wait

index=0
for out in "${output[@]}"; do
    val="$(<"${out}")"
    rm -f "${out}"

    export ${var_names[index]}="$val"

    index=$((index+1))
done

unset data
unset output
unset processes

Best Answer

After some ruminations, I came up with an ugly workaround:

#!/bin/bash
proc1=$(mktemp)
proc2=$(mktemp)
proc3=$(mktemp)

/path/to/longprocess1 > "$proc1" &
pid1=$!
/path/to/longprocess2 > "$proc2" &
pid2=$!
/path/to/longprocess3 > "$proc3" &
pid3=$!

wait "$pid1" "$pid2" "$pid3"
export var1="<("$proc1")"
export var2="<("$proc2")"
export var3="<("$proc3")"
rm -f "$proc1" "$proc2" "$proc3"

As requested in a comment, here is how to make this more extensible for an arbitrarily large list:

#!/bin/bash
declare -a pids
declare -a data
declare -a output
declare -a processes

# Generate the list of processes for demonstrative purposes
processes+=("/path/to/longprocess1")
processes+=("/path/to/longprocess2")
processes+=("/path/to/longprocess3")

index=0
for process in "${processes[@]}"; do
    output+=("$(mktemp")
    $process > ${output[$index]} &
    pids+=("$!")
    index=$((index+1))
done
wait ${pids[@]}
index=0
for process in "${processes[@]}"; do
    data+="$(<"${output[index]}")"
    rm -f "${output[index]}"
    index=$((index+1))
done
export data

The resultant output will be in the data array.

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