Bash – How to kill and wait for background processes to finish in a shell script when I Ctrl+C it

As others have said, there isn't any way to wait on "not" a process ID. However this pattern of code doesn't seem that bad to me, so I offer it as a suggested way of achieving what you're after.

It makes use of Bash arrays which you can then give as a list to the wait command.

Example

A modified version of your example code, cmd.bash.

!/bin/bash

array[0]=1
array[0]=2

sleep 30 &
pid=$!

pidArr=()
for i in ${array[@]}; do
  for n in $(seq 3); do
    if [ $n -eq 1 ]; then
      sleep 31 > file &
      pidArr+=($!)
    else
      sleep 32 >> file &
      pidArr+=($!)
    fi
  done
done

echo ${pidArr[@]}

I've substituted sleep commands in this example just to simulate some long running jobs that we can background. They have nothing to do with this other than to act as stand-ins.

Also the final echo command is there purely so we can see what happens when the for loops complete. Ultimately we'll replace it with an actual wait command, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Example run #1

So let's run our program and see what happens.

$ ./cmd.bash 
24666 24667 24668

Now if we check ps:

$ ps -eaf|grep sleep
saml     24664     1  0 22:28 pts/9    00:00:00 sleep 30
saml     24666     1  0 22:28 pts/9    00:00:00 sleep 31
saml     24667     1  0 22:28 pts/9    00:00:00 sleep 32
saml     24668     1  0 22:28 pts/9    00:00:00 sleep 32

If we wait a bit, these will ultimately finish. But this shows that if we add the process IDs to an array we can echo them out afterwards.

Example #2

So let's change that echo line out and swap in a wait line now, something like this:

  wait ${pidArr[@]}

Now when we run our modified version we see that it's waiting on ALL the process IDs:

$ ./cmd.bash 

...after ~30 seconds passes

$

We get back our prompt. So we successfully waited for all the processes. A quick check of ps:

$ ps -eaf|grep sleep
$

So it worked.

You can use the command wait PID to wait for a process to end.

You can also retrieve the PID of the last command with $!

In your case, something like this would work:

command1 & #run command1 in background
PID=$! #catch the last PID, here from command1
command2 #run command2 while command1 is running in background
wait $PID #wait for command1, in background, to end
command3 #execute once command1 ended

Following your edit, as you have multiple PIDs and you know them, you can do that:

command1 & #run command1 in background
PID1=xxxxx
PID2=yyyyy
PID3=xxyyy
PID4=yyxxx
command2 #run command2 while command1 is running in background
wait $PID1 $PID2 $PID3 $PID4 #wait for the four processes of command1, in background, to end
command3 #execute once command1 ended