$! variable and redirection to command

[msmucr]

Hello to all board members here,

i'm little bit stuck with one script thing, so I will be very happy, if have some ideas regarding this.
I would like to create simple wrapper to start program in background, pipe its output to syslog and create pidfile.
Basically something like this:

$command 2>&1 | logger -t $syslogtag ($!) &
echo $! > $pidfile

I'm using logger command for redirection to syslog, -t is syslog tag, so it will write something like "mydaemon (pid)" on every line of program output.
So far, so good. But obviously when I would like to write pidfile, value in $! variable is updated by pid of logger process.

I tried few things
- $_ variable normally holds, last argument of last command (so it should be "(pid)"), but it won't work for me.
- any subcommands for storing of command pid to some variable broke redirection or sending to background
- pid of subsequent command is usually incremented by one, so theoretically i could subtract one to get first pid, but it is controlled by OS and i can't rely on this.

Do you know some way, how to solve it?

Thank you

Michal Smucr

[msmucr]

Hello,

it seems, that i got one trick.
I found on man page of bash, that jobs builtin ivocation:
jobs -p List only the process ID of the job’s process group leader.

I my case with backgrounded job, first command is process group leader, so
echo $(jobs -p) > $pidfile
works fine.

Best regards

Michal Smucr