A coprocess is a shell command preceded by the coproc
reserved word.
A coprocess is executed asynchronously in a subshell, as if the command
had been terminated with the ‘&’ control operator, with a two-way pipe
established between the executing shell and the coprocess.
The format for a coprocess is:
coproc [NAME] command [redirections]
This creates a coprocess named NAME. If NAME is not supplied, the default name is COPROC. NAME must not be supplied if command is a simple command (see Simple Commands); otherwise, it is interpreted as the first word of the simple command.
When the coproc is executed, the shell creates an array variable (see Arrays) named NAME in the context of the executing shell. The standard output of command is connected via a pipe to a file descriptor in the executing shell, and that file descriptor is assigned to NAME[0]. The standard input of command is connected via a pipe to a file descriptor in the executing shell, and that file descriptor is assigned to NAME[1]. This pipe is established before any redirections specified by the command (see Redirections). The file descriptors can be utilized as arguments to shell commands and redirections using standard word expansions.
The process id of the shell spawned to execute the coprocess is
available as the value of the variable NAME_PID.
The wait
builtin command may be used to wait for the coprocess to terminate.
The return status of a coprocess is the exit status of command.