how to write a process-pool bash shell

I have more than 10 tasks to execute, and the system restrict that there at most 4 tasks can run at the same time.

My task can be started like: myprog taskname

How can I write a bash shell script to run these task. The most important thing is that when one task finish, the script can start another immediately, making the running tasks count remain 4 all the time.

I chanced upon this thread while looking into writing my own process pool and particularly liked Brandon Horsley's solution, though I couldn't get the signals working right, so I took inspiration from Apache and decided to try a pre-fork model with a fifo as my job queue.

The following function is the function that the worker processes run when forked.

# \brief the worker function that is called when we fork off worker processes
# \param[in] id  the worker ID
# \param[in] job_queue  the fifo to read jobs from
# \param[in] result_log  the temporary log file to write exit codes to
function _job_pool_worker()
{
    local id=$1
    local job_queue=$2
    local result_log=$3
    local line=

    exec 7<> ${job_queue}
    while [[ "${line}" != "${job_pool_end_of_jobs}" && -e "${job_queue}" ]]; do
        # workers block on the exclusive lock to read the job queue
        flock --exclusive 7
        read line <${job_queue}
        flock --unlock 7
        # the worker should exit if it sees the end-of-job marker or run the
        # job otherwise and save its exit code to the result log.
        if [[ "${line}" == "${job_pool_end_of_jobs}" ]]; then
            # write it one more time for the next sibling so that everyone
            # will know we are exiting.
            echo "${line}" >&7
        else
            _job_pool_echo "### _job_pool_worker-${id}: ${line}"
            # run the job
            { ${line} ; } 
            # now check the exit code and prepend "ERROR" to the result log entry
            # which we will use to count errors and then strip out later.
            local result=$?
            local status=
            if [[ "${result}" != "0" ]]; then
                status=ERROR
            fi  
            # now write the error to the log, making sure multiple processes
            # don't trample over each other.
            exec 8<> ${result_log}
            flock --exclusive 8
            echo "${status}job_pool: exited ${result}: ${line}" >> ${result_log}
            flock --unlock 8
            exec 8>&-
            _job_pool_echo "### _job_pool_worker-${id}: exited ${result}: ${line}"
        fi  
    done
    exec 7>&-
}

You can get a copy of my solution at Github. Here's a sample program using my implementation.

#!/bin/bash

. job_pool.sh

function foobar()
{
    # do something
    true
}   

# initialize the job pool to allow 3 parallel jobs and echo commands
job_pool_init 3 0

# run jobs
job_pool_run sleep 1
job_pool_run sleep 2
job_pool_run sleep 3
job_pool_run foobar
job_pool_run foobar
job_pool_run /bin/false

# wait until all jobs complete before continuing
job_pool_wait

# more jobs
job_pool_run /bin/false
job_pool_run sleep 1
job_pool_run sleep 2
job_pool_run foobar

# don't forget to shut down the job pool
job_pool_shutdown

# check the $job_pool_nerrors for the number of jobs that exited non-zero
echo "job_pool_nerrors: ${job_pool_nerrors}"

Hope this helps!