problems substituting 'jobs' in a bash script

[Robert Whent (rwhent)]

I am having real problems in retrieving the response from 'jobs' after
backgrounding a number of jobs
 
sleep 100 &
sleep 200 &
sleep 300 &
 
JOBS=`jobs`
 
echo $JOBS
 
this return nothing at all
 
If I access bash from the command line though, I can manually execute
the same commands and see the jobs ok
In the same script I can retrieve responses from other commands such as
`ls`
 
I have tried many things but am at a loss to see why this substitution
fails to work ???
 
I have also trawled the web and can find no reports of any issues ?
 
 
Regards,
 
Rob