Question

I have a program which runs a certain processing suits on a large set of data. This task is run by a script which executes this program and waits for the processing to complete. I need a way to signal the completion from the program to the script and the script should do a wait on this signal, preferably a timed wait. And after this signal is received we should continue some other things in the script. I am not sure what sort of signalling to use in this case. Would traditional unix signals work ? I have never worked with them in shells. Also my shell is a korn shell.

Answer 1

If i understood your question correctly, you can get this done using just a simple wait.
Your script can be tailored like this:

#!/bin/ksh -p
..
...
...

./your_program_working_on_data_set &
pid=$!

wait $pid
.....
##continue the rest of the stuff
.....
.....
.....

Hope this helped.

EDIT: Sorry about this edit. Signal can be sent using the kill command and trap command to catch the signals.