Capturing verbose exit codes

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi,

Whenever some job is sent to the background and it finishes, it displays 
a message on the shell with the exit code. Something like this;

> [1]-  Done                    emacs
> [2]+  Terminated              gedit

I understand that I can get the exit code with $? but is there some way 
I can get the associated message (Done/Terminated/Sementation Fault...) 
with the exit code?

I want to use this in shell function/scripts to notify me whether any of 
my submitted jobs succeeded or failed, and if they failed then with what 
exit code.

Thanks for any insights.

-- 
Suvayu

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