question for bashers: a bash command entered as a foreground job may fork, leave something in the background, and exit to the bash prompt, and the job in the background will print it's output whenever it has any. So far so good. i want to enter a command which launches 3 subcommands in parallel, wait up to 3 seconds unless all 3 subcommands finish sooner, sort all their output-so-far together, print it, and exit to the bash prompt at this point, and if any of the subcommands weren't finished, leave them in the background and let them print more output whenever they have any. easy? hard? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20210325/2e52e5fc/attachment.htm>