#include <sys/wait.h>
int wait(statusp) int *statusp;
int waitpid(pid, statusp, options) int pid; int *statusp; int options;
#include <sys/time.h> #include <sys/resource.h>
int wait3(statusp, options, rusage) int *statusp; int options; struct rusage *rusage;
int wait4(pid, statusp, options, rusage) int pid; int *statusp; int options; struct rusage *rusage;
WIFSTOPPED(status) int status;
WIFSIGNALED(status) int status;
WIFEXITED(status) int status
WEXITSTATUS(status) int status
WTERMSIG(status) int status
WSTOPSIG(status) int status
#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/wait.h>
pid_t wait(statusp) int *statusp;
pid_t waitpid(pid, statusp, options) pid_t pid; int *statusp; int options;
wait() delays its caller until a signal is received or one of its child processes terminates or stops due to tracing. If any child has died or stopped due to tracing and this has not been reported using wait(), return is immediate, returning the process ID and exit status of one of those children. If that child had died, it is discarded. If there are no children, return is immediate with the value -1 returned. If there are only running or stopped but reported children, the calling process is blocked.
If statusp is not a NULL pointer, then on return from a successful wait() call the status of the child process whose process ID is the return value of wait() is stored in the location pointed to by statusp. It indicates the cause of termination and other information about the terminated process in the following manner:
waitpid() behaves identically to wait() if pid has a value of -1 and options has a value of zero. Otherwise, the behavior of waitpid() is modified by the values of pid and options as follows:
pid specifies a set of child processes for which status is requested. waitpid() only returns the status of a child process from this set.
options is constructed from the bitwise inclusive OR of zero or more of the following flags, defined in the header <sys/wait.h>:
wait3() is an alternate interface that allows both non-blocking status collection and the collection of the status of children stopped by any means. The status parameter is defined as above. The options parameter is used to indicate the call should not block if there are no processes that have status to report (WNOHANG), and/or that children of the current process that are stopped due to a SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU, SIGTSTP, or SIGSTOP signal are eligible to have their status reported as well (WUNTRACED). A terminated child is discarded after it reports status, and a stopped process will not report its status more than once. If rusage is not a NULL pointer, a summary of the resources used by the terminated process and all its children is returned. (This information is currently not available for stopped processes.)
When the WNOHANG option is specified and no processes have status to report, wait3() returns 0. The WNOHANG and WUNTRACED options may be combined by ORing the two values.
wait4() is another alternate interface. With a pid argument of 0, it is equivalent to wait3(). If pid has a nonzero value, then wait4() returns status only for the indicated process ID, but not for any other child processes.
WIFSTOPPED, WIFSIGNALED, WIFEXITED, WEXITSTATUS, WTERMSIG, and WSTOPSIG are macros that take an argument status, of type `int', as returned by wait(), wait3(), or wait4(). WIFSTOPPED evaluates to true (1) when the process for which the wait() call was made is stopped, or to false (0) otherwise. If WIFSTOPPED(status) is non-zero, WSTOPSIG evaluates to the number of the signal that caused the child process to stop. WIFSIGNALED evaluates to true when the process was terminated with a signal. If WIFSIGNALED(status) is non-zero, WTERMSIG evaluates to the number of the signal that caused the termination of the child process. WIFEXITED evaluates to true when the process exited by using an exit.2v call. If WIFEXITED(status) is non-zero, WEXITSTATUS evaluates to the low-order byte of the argument that the child process passed to _exit() (see exit.2v or exit.3 or the value the child process returned from main() (see execve.2v
If the information stored at the location pointed to by statusp was stored there by a call to waitpid() that specified the WUNTRACED flag, exactly one of the macros WIFEXITED(*statusp), WIFSIGNALED(*statusp), and WIFSTOPPED(*statusp) will evaluate to a non-zero value. If the information stored at the location pointed to by statusp was stored there by a call to waitpid() that did not specify the WUNTRACED flag or by a call to wait(), exactly one of the macros WIFEXITED(*statusp) and WIFSIGNALED(*statusp) will evaluate to a non-zero value.
If a parent process terminates witout waiting for all of its child processes to terminate, the remaining child processes are assigned the parent process ID of 1, corresponding to init.8
If wait() or waitpid() return due to the delivery of a signal to the calling process, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to EINTR. If waitpid() function was invoked with WNOHANG set in options, it has at least one child process specified by pid for which status is not available, and status is not available for any process specified by pid, a value of zero is returned. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.
wait3() and wait4() return 0 if WNOHANG is specified and there are no stopped or exited children, and return the process ID of the child process if they return due to a stopped or terminated child process. Otherwise, they return a value of -1 and set errno to indicate the error.
waitpid() may set errno to:
wait(), wait3(), and wait4() will terminate prematurely, return -1, and set errno to: EINTR upon the arrival of a signal whose SV_INTERRUPT bit in its flags field is set (see sigvec.2 and siginterrupt.3v signal.3v in the System V compatibility library, sets this bit for any signal it catches.
If a parent process terminates without waiting on its children, the initialization process (process ID = 1) inherits the children.
wait(), wait3(), and wait4() are automatically restarted when a process receives a signal while awaiting termination of a child process, unless the SV_INTERRUPT bit is set in the flags for that signal.
Previous SunOS releases used union wait *statusp and union wait status in place of int *statusp and intstatus. The union contained a member w_status that could be treated in the same way as status.
Other members of the wait union could be used to extract this information more conveniently:
union wait is obsolete in light of the new specifications provided by IEEE Std 1003.1-1988 and endorsed by SVID89 and XPG3. SunOS Release 4.1 supports union wait for backward compatibility, but it will disappear in a future release.
Created by unroff & hp-tools. © somebody (See intro for details). All Rights Reserved. Last modified 11/5/97