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Accepted
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy
Asked: 2018-09-04 15:15:26 +0800 CST

How to get a process exit status from another shell session?

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Suppose I run a command in one shell session, for example bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get upgrade'. 5 minutes later I decide to go outside for a snack, and realize I forgot to add some form of notification mechanism for whether exit was success or failure.

Well, what do I now ? If only I could query from another terminal the exit status of that other command ( or specifically, that PID), maybe I could after all display some sort of pop up. So the question is: how can I query exit status of an already running process from another terminal ?

In other words,

GIVEN that I have a running process in terminal A AND its PID is known

WHEN I execute some command in terminal B

THEN I should be able to know if process in terminal A finishes with exit status 0 or exit status >1.

scripts command-line process

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Use strace as follows:

    sudo strace -e trace=none -e signal=none -q -p $PID

    Neither system calls nor signals are of interest here, so we tell strace to ignore them with the -e expressions and supress a status message with -q. strace attaches to the process with PID $PID, waits for it to exit normally and outputs its exit status like this:

    +++ exited with 0 +++

    A simple if expression to call any type of notification could be:

    if sudo strace -e trace=none -e signal=none -q -p $PID |& grep -q ' 0 '; then
  echo yeah
else
  echo nope
fi

    Example run

    # in terminal 1
$ (echo $BASHPID;sleep 10;true)
8807
# in terminal 2
$ if sudo strace -e{trace,signal}=none -qp8807|&grep -q ' 0 ';then echo yeah;else echo nope;fi
yeah

# in terminal 1
$ (echo $BASHPID;sleep 10;false)
12285
# in terminal 2
$ if sudo strace -e{trace,signal}=none -qp12285|&grep -q ' 0 ';then echo yeah;else echo nope;fi
nope

    Most of the credit goes to this answer on U&L, please leave an upvote there if you find this useful.

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