jb - simple job manager

I have a problem where I want to run commands in the background and be able view the status and output from anywhere. Kind of like jobs but not bound to a specific process and a little friendlier.

My personal use cases include:

• run godoc on Go projects to view the documentation
• File watcher for hot updating in Svelete development
• Long running (but eventually ending) operations e.g. system backups

jb is a simple script to manage background jobs. It does only four things:

1. Run jobs in background
2. Print logs
3. Lists all recorded jobs
4. Clear stopped jobs from record

Example

I'm going to start on a new Go project, so I want to be able to view the documentation for the standard libraries in the browser with godoc.

I first use jb list to check if the godoc documentation server is still running from last time.

$ jb list
JOB ID  STATUS  PID     COMMAND
1       STOPPED 8370    godoc

Seems like it has stopped since my computer has rebooted since then. So lets start it again

$ jb run godoc
2

jb returns the job id so that could be used in scripts. We can check it is indeed running with

$ jb list
JOB ID  STATUS  PID     COMMAND
1       STOPPED 8370    godoc
2       RUNNING 969753  godoc

Though we can see that our previous command is still displayed there. We can clear it with jb clear

$ jb clear
$ jb list
JOB ID  STATUS  PID     COMMAND
2       RUNNING 969753  godoc

I can then inspect the output of the command by providing its job id to jb log

~ $ jb log 2
using module mode; GOMOD=/dev/null

If I wanted to kill the process, I would simply issue a kill command with the PID given by jb list

$ kill 969753
$ jb list
JOB ID  STATUS  PID     COMMAND
2       STOPPED 969753  godoc

we can see that indeed the process has stopped