Re: OT: launching jobs in a combined serial parallel way

[Johan Kullstam <kullstj-ml@comcast.net>]

Kamaraju S Kusumanchi <raju.mailinglists@gmail.com> writes:

> I have three programs - say proga, progb, progc.
>
> proga, progb are completely independent. They take couple of hours to
> finish. The time to complete proga, progb are not same.
>
> progc should to be launched only after both proga, progb are finished. progc
> takes another couple of hours to finish.
>
> What is good way to automate this problem (that is no manual interaction)? I
> prefer to use nohup since sometimes I have to log out of the machine before
> the whole process finishes.
>
> Currently I have a shell script that works as below.
> 1) launch proga, progb in the background using nohup.
> 2) Ask proga, progb to write a file when they finish.
> 3) Every five minutes check if these files are present. If they are present,
> launch progc.

Use make.  I like to use make for all sorts of things, not just
compiles.  And, since you are already using the existance of a file to
check for done, you are practically there.  Make with the "-j" parameter
will spawn parallel jobs for you.

Write a makefile similar this:


proga.out:
             proga

progb.out:
             progb

probc.out:   proga.out progb.out
             progc


Then you can do

$ nohup make -j 2 &

Maybe a redirect of the text output to a file.  Now you can walk away.


-- 
Johan KULLSTAM