WAIT(1) | General Commands Manual | WAIT(1)

# NAME

wait — await process completion

# SYNOPSIS

wait | [pid]

# DESCRIPTION

If invoked with no arguments, the wait utility waits until all existing child processes in the background have terminated.

Available operands:

pid
  If a pid operand is specified, and it is the process ID of a background child process that still exists, the wait utility waits until that process has completed and consumes its status information, without consuming the status information of any other process.

  If a pid operand is specified that is not the process ID of a child background process that still exists, wait exits without waiting for any processes to complete.

The wait utility exits with one of the following values:

0
  The wait utility was invoked with no operands and all of the existing background child processes have terminated, or the process specified by the pid operand exited normally with 0 as its exit status.
>0
  The specified process did not exist and its exit status information was not available, or the specified process existed or its exit status information was available, and it terminated with a non-zero exit status.

If the specified process terminated abnormally due to the receipt of a signal, the exit status information of wait contains that termination status as well.

# STANDARDS

The wait command is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 (“POSIX.2”) compatible.

June 5, 1993 | NetBSD 6.0