Hello all. This is a "point me to the right direction" post. I was recently given the following assignment:

There is an old HW design regression script. It has an interactive shell (the simplest, one, with reading STDIN), and it has many threads. The threads send simulation runs (1 for each), as regressions to SUN grid. The main thread should monitor the interactive shell input, and decide just how many threads are being used to send the runs (and use the treads to report log data from their respective job).

The script uses global variables, a lot of non thread safe functions, and known to create more zombies than Alice from Resident Evil can handle.

It need a re-haul (at best)... After giving the background, here's a few things that my boss wants me to do:

1. See if there is a script/utility which is thread safe and has shell power (tab completion...).

2. See if there is a way to minimize the thread number to two (i.e., shell and the grid scheduler, which will use sun grid polling).