job control in a script / zsh parallelism problem.

[Simon Mages <mages.simon@googlemail.com>]

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Hi,

i have some Problems with the job control in zsh.

In the following Script i tried to start 3 background processes, because
thats the only way i know to run things parallel in zsh, and write a "dot"
every two seconds during the runtime of this background Processes.

#!/usr/bin/zsh

#set -x

for i in a b c
do
 sleep 120 &
done

jobs -l

jobs -l |wc -l

var=`jobs -l|wc -l`

while [ $var -gt "0" ]
do
 print "."
 sleep 2
 var=`jobs -l|wc -l`
done

The Problem is that "jobs -l" in the Script writes an complete background
process list to stdout but "jobs -l|wc -l" just prints a "0"? When i run
"jobs -l|wc -l" manual with some background jobs it is working fine.

Can someone Point me i the right direction, i'm running out of useful ideas.

Here the Output of the Script without set -x:

#> ./test.sh
[2] 4916 running sleep 120
[3] - 1716 running sleep 120
[4] + 4160 running sleep 120
0

here with set -x:

#> ./test.sh
+./test.sh:5> i=a
+./test.sh:5> i=b
+./test.sh:7> sleep 120
+./test.sh:7> sleep 120
+./test.sh:5> i=c
+./test.sh:10> jobs -l
[2] 3532 running sleep 120
[3] - 1600 running sleep 120
[4] + 5292 running sleep 120
+./test.sh:7> sleep 120
+./test.sh:12> jobs -l
+./test.sh:12> wc -l
0
+./test.sh:14> var=+./test.sh:14> var=+./test.sh:14> jobs -l
+./test.sh:14> wc -l
+./test.sh:14> var=0
+./test.sh:16> [ 0 -gt 0 ']'


My test environment:

#> zsh --version
zsh 4.3.12 (i686-pc-cygwin)


BR Simon