Want to take your long running commands and run them at the same time? You'll also want to:

• see the progress
• tail the output
• be notified if they error

We'll need code to hold our log files, process ids and wait for them to finish

# log files & process ids
LOG_FILEPATHS_ARRAY=()
PIDS_ARRAY=()

# process pids & echo errors if needed
process_pids () {

        for pid in "${PIDS_ARRAY[@]}"
        do
                werr=0
                wait $pid || werr=$?
                if [ "$werr" != 0 ] && [ "$werr" != 127 ] ; then
                        echo ". failed: ${LOG_FILEPATHS_ARRAY[$pid]}"
                else
                        echo "."
                fi
        done
}

With this we can kick off long running processes like so

# each command gets it's own logfile
log_filepath="/tmp/some_logfile_name.output"

# set command
CMD="<do_something_here>"

# log header
echo "" >> $log_filepath
echo $CMD >> $log_filepath
echo "" >> $log_filepath

# go!
$CMD >> $log_filepath 2>&1  &

# save pid & logfile
pid=$!
PIDS_ARRAY+=($pid)
LOG_FILEPATHS_ARRAY[$pid]=$log_filepath

Do the above for each command you want to run. Then wait for them to finish with the following

if [ ! -z "${PIDS_ARRAY:-}" ]; then
        echo ""
        echo " waiting for builds to finish..."
        echo "    tail -f /tmp/make.core.*.output"
        echo ""
        process_pids
else
        echo " nothing to do.. did you 'make get' yet?"
fi

#
# DONE
#

printf " DONE"
echo ""

And Voila, which is French for...... and then it just works.