Waiting for things to happen on Linux

There are always things to wait for on a Linux system—upgrades to complete, processes to finish, coworkers to log in and help resolve problems, status reports to be ready.

Fortunately, you don’t have to sit twiddling your thumbs. Instead, you can get Linux to do the waiting and let you know when the work is done. You can do this with a script or you can use the wait command, a bash built-in that watches for processes running in the background to complete.

Crafting waiting within scripts

There are many ways to craft waiting within a script. Here’s a simple…