wait

This command behaves the same as the run command, except that it waits for the completion of the process or program before continuing.

Syntax

wait <command-line>

The must start with the path of an executable, followed by its parameters, if any.

The wait command checks the exit code of the executable.

The wait command has two available override keywords: timeout_seconds, and disposition. See the override documentation for details.

On Windows

On a Windows computer, this command has the same effect as calling the CreateProcess function with <command-line>. This is also the same as using <command-line> in the Windows Run dialog.

The use of quotes ("") is recommended practice, and necessary if there are spaces in the path of the executable or in its parameters.

Examples:

Run the scandskw.exe program and wait for it to complete.

wait "scandskw.exe"

On non-Windows platforms

The wait command expects to run a single executable, not a series of commands.

If you need to wait for a series of commands to complete:

• you can pass them as a string to your shell
• you can create a shell script and run it

If you want to run inline shell commands, you can do as follows

wait /bin/sh -c "your command"

However, compared to typing your command in the terminal, the following differences apply:

• your command string must start with double quotes ("), not with single quotes (')
• to access the value of a variable declared in your command string, do not escape the $
• changes to your environment variables might be lost

Examples:

To create a file with a bit of text. Note that you must start the command string with double quotes, but can use single quotes inside it. Quote escaping works as expected.

/bin/sh -c "echo 'my text' > \"/root/Desktop/my file.txt\""

To initialize an environment variable and print it to a file, the command in the terminal would be

/bin/sh -c 'export MY_ENV_VAR="my value"; /bin/echo "$MY_ENV_VAR" > /root/Desktop/myFile.txt'

or

/bin/sh -c "export MY_ENV_VAR='my value'; /bin/echo \$MY_ENV_VAR > /root/Desktop/myFile.txt"

But to run it with the wait command, you would write it as follows

/bin/sh -c "export MY_ENV_VAR='my value'; /bin/echo $MY_ENV_VAR > /root/Desktop/myFile.txt"

Just remember that, after the command ends, changes to MY_ENV_VAR will be discarded.

To create a shell script and run it.

delete __createfile
createfile until END_OF_FILE
#!/bin/sh
export MY_ENV_VAR="my_value"
/bin/echo "$MY_ENV_VAR5" > "/root/Desktop/my_file.txt"
END_OF_FILE

delete my_script.sh
move __createfile my_script.sh

wait chmod +x ./my_script.sh
wait /bin/sh -c "./my_script.sh"
delete my_script.sh