"set -o notify" for job runing background in Bash

[lehe]

Hi,
I call "set -o notify" to notify me when my background jobs finish. I find that the messages upon finishing are different: for some job, it starts sometimes with "[jobID]", sometimes with "[jobID]+" and sometimes "[jobID]-". I wonder what they mean actually? Do they mean the jobs are finished abnormally?
Thanks and regards!

[sknake]

Does the output differ on the same machine running the process at different times, or is this the result of testing on multiple machines?

[lehe]

same machine. I submitted my jobs background one after the other so that they can run in parallel. All the jobs running the same executable with different commandline argument.

[sknake]

Odd... I think they are meaningless. The "-" appears on the next-to-last job in the queue, and the "+" appears on the last. They only seem to appear if you have more than one job in the scheduler.

sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[1] 30759
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[2] 19363
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[3] 23916
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[4] 31536
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[5] 1792
sk@sk:/tmp$ pwd
/tmp
[1]   Done                    sleep 3
[2]   Done                    sleep 3
[3]   Done                    sleep 3
[4]-  Done                    sleep 3
[5]+  Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[1] 32700
sk@sk:/tmp$ pwd
/tmp
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[2] 19294
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[3] 31057
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[4] 9998
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[5] 1642
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[6] 23721
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 3 &
[7] 24950
[1]   Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$
[2]   Done                    sleep 3
[3]   Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$
[4]   Done                    sleep 3
[5]   Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$
[6]-  Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$
[7]+  Done                    sleep 3
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 4 &
[24] 11626
[14]   Done                    sleep 4
sk@sk:/tmp$ sleep 4 &
[25] 4904
[15]   Done                    sleep 4
sk@sk:/tmp$
[16]   Done                    sleep 4
[17]   Done                    sleep 4
[18]   Done                    sleep 4
[19]   Done                    sleep 4
[20]   Done                    sleep 4
[21]   Done                    sleep 4
[22]   Done                    sleep 4
sk@sk:/tmp$
[23]   Done                    sleep 4
[24]-  Done                    sleep 4
[25]+  Done                    sleep 4