safely killing a background process

Question

I'm writing data to a pipe in a parent process. The parent process creates a background job that reads data from the pipe & write it to the screen & to a log file.
How can I know when to kill the background job? wait command simply waits forever. I prefer to not use a token to detect the "end of output". Code example:

function log()
{
    if [ -z "$counter" ]; then
        counter=1
    else
        (( ++counter ))
    fi

    if ! [[ -z "$teepid" ]]; then
        # ***** How can I know if it's safe to kill here?
        kill $teepid
    fi
    # Display text-to-be-logged on screen
    #  & write text-to-be-logged to it's corresponding log file
    tee <"$pipe" 1>&4 "${logs_dir}/${counter}_${1// /_}" &
    teepid=$!
}

logs_dir="/path/to/log/dir"

pipe_dir=$(mktemp -d)
pipe="${pipe_dir}/cmds_output"
mkfifo "$pipe"
exec 3<>"$pipe" # link file descriptor (FD) #3 to $pipe for r/w
exec 4<&1   # save value of FD1 to FD4
exec 1>&3   # redirect all output to FD3

log # Logs the following code block
{
    # ... Many bash commands ...
}

log # Logs the following code block
{
    # ... Many bash commands ...
}

if ! [[ -z "$teepid" ]]; then
    # ***** How can I know if it's safe to kill here? Maybe it's still logging
    kill $teepid;
fi

---

Edit:

I tried:

exec 3>&-
#exec 1>&- # Have tried also uncommenting this row
wait $teepid
exec 3<>"$pipe"
exec 1>&3
kill $teepid

but the wait command still hangs... I found that ps -o pid,ppid,s --pid $teepid shows the state of the process. Should I count on that?

Answer 1

Just close the pipe when you are done. The child process will reach EOF and should exit.