So in this case there's a couple notable things:

`wait` can take no parameters this means that if you just ran a bunch of things in the background in your script and want to wait for all of them to finish, you don't need to track the PIDs or a loop, you can just `wait`.

`wait` is a bash builtin (in this case) and as such it has no parameter limit (although I am told that actually there are some weird limits but it's very unlikely you will be able to spawn enough processes at once from a bash script to hit the limits). Given an array `pids` you can just do: `wait "${pids[@]}"`

The only problem with the two above approaches is that in the former case, wait loses the return status and in the second case wait loses all but the status of the last ID you pass it, so the third option is:

    pids=()
    do_thing_1 &
    pids+=("$!")
    do_thing_2 &
    pids+=("$!")
    for pid in "${pids[@]}"; do
        wait "$pid" || status=$?
    done
    exit "${status-0}"

Now you only have the issue left that this will report the LAST failing status.

Thanks for the explanations! Tracking if anything fails is normally important for what I'm doing, so I quite like that array-based solution. I really like that `"$pid" || status=$?`; it's much nicer than `if ! wait $pid; then status=1; fi` I have in there.

Try GNU parallel.