Run “N” Shell Scripts in Folder

Question

I have a working piece of code to run all scripts in a directory: Run all shell scripts in folder

for f in *.sh; do \
bash "$f" -H || break
done

I also have code to run a sequence of .sh scripts:

for f in {1..3}madeupname.sh; do \
bash "$f" -H || break
done

Now instead of running all .sh scripts or a range of .sh scripts, I want to run "N" number of .sh scripts where N is an arbitrary number say 3 .sh scripts for example.

The order in which N files are run is not important to me.

Answer 1

find the scripts, get the head , then execute with xargs .

find . -name '*.sh' | head -n 10 | xargs -n1 sh

You can run the scripts in parallel with xargs with a simple -P0 option. You can script the xargs with some xargs sh -c 'bash "$@" -H || exit 125' -- xargs sh -c 'bash "$@" -H || exit 125' -- to make xargs exit with nonzero status or immediately after any of the scripts fail to run or something.

If you feel like unfamiliar with xargs , just do a simple while read loop:

find . -name '*.sh' | head -n 10 | 
while IFS= read -r script; do
    bash "$script" -H || break
done

And in parallel you have to get out of the pipe subshell:

while IFS= read -r script; do
    bash "$script" -H || break &
done < <(
     find . -name '*.sh' | head -n 10
)
wait # for all the childs

or wait for childs in the subshell itself:

find . -name '*.sh' | head -n 10 |
{
    while IFS= read -r script; do
        bash "$script" -H || break &
    done
    wait
}

Answer 2

From comments, keeping a count of process run

count=0
for f in *.sh; do
    bash "$f" -H || break
    ((++count>=3)) && break
done