I had to do this recently and ended up with the following solution:

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while true; do

  wait -n || {

    code="$?"

    ([[ $code = "127" ]] && exit 0 || exit "$code")

    break

  }

done;

Here's how it works:

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wait -n exits as soon as one of the (potentially many) background jobs exits. It always evaluates to true and the loop goes on until:

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Exit code 127: the last background job successfully exited. In that case, we ignore the exit code and exit the sub-shell with code 0.

Any of the background job failed. We just exit the sub-shell with that exit code.

With set -e, this will guarantee that the script will terminate early and pass through the exit code of any failed background job.

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