N-way parallel mail retrieval with getmail and bash

I wrote a pretty sweet script tonight. It parallelizes the getmail retrieval process, while still printing prefixes so I know which accounts download which messages. This means that instead of my mail fetching process taking sum(i1,…,in), where i is the length of time for a given mail retrieval, my fetching process now takes max(i1,…,in).


#!/bin/sh
GETMAIL='python2.3 -Wignore /usr/bin/getmail'
unwanted() {
  grep -E -v '(Copyright|getmail|Simple)';
}

echo "N-WAY GETMAIL RETRIEVER SCRIPT:"
$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/account1 \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/account1................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/account2 \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/account2................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

...

$GETMAIL \
  --rcfile=/etc/getmail/accountN \
  2>&1 | sed -e \
  's/.*/accountN................: &/g' \
  | unwanted &

wait

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