WAIT(1) BSD 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 informa‐
tion 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”) compati‐
ble.
BSD June 5, 1993 BSD
