Hi
I would like to know if i can do polling in shell script ..basically i want to wait till certain task1 is completed than only start task2....can i do this in shell script

aprreciate ur help...Thx in advance

I'm not sure that a shell script is the way to do this, or at least there may be better options. How will you determine that task1 is done? How often do you want to check?

If you are starting both tasks in the script,
you can run task 1 in the background like this:

task_1 &

The $! variable holds the Process ID of the last backgrounded process. Thus if you used this and the wait command, task 2 would not start until task 1 completes. example:

task_1 &
wait $!
echo "Task 1 finished, starting task 2"
task_2

If task 1 is already running and you want to start task 2 when it completes, do something like this (adjust the sleep time as needed):

#! /bin/ksh
while : ; do
if pgrep TASK_1_NAME ; then
:
else
Start_task_2_here
break
fi
sleep 30
done
print "Task 2 started at `date`"

Hope this helped.
-jim