Copyright (c) 2014 Jess Mahan

This simple to use library provides multi-threading capability for your bash scripts in a posix threads style.

Include this into your script:

#!/bin/bash
source ~/threads.sh

Initialize the library, limiting the maximum thread count to Defining max threads is important, otherwise you could potentially fork bomb yourself.

Create no more than this many threads

Create a single thread of with

thread_wait should be called immediately after this.

A command to run in a new thread / process Arguments to pass to the command

Block until we are no longer at

When called with an argument (such as "thread_wait final"), blocks parent until all threads are complete

In this example, we have a file called "hosts.txt" which contains a single hostname per line. We then create 64 simulaneous worker threads to each resolve the hostname and then exit.

#!/bin/bash

. ./threads.sh

function nslkup {
     dig +short $1
}
thread_init 64
for i in $(cat hosts.txt)
do
  thread_create nslkup ${i}
  if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
    thread_wait
    thread_create nslkup ${i}
  fi
done
thread_wait final