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Manual page for waitpid(2)

waitpid - wait for child process to change state

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>

pid_t waitpid(pid_t pid, int *stat_loc, int options);

MT-LEVEL

Async-Signal-Safe

DESCRIPTION

waitpid() suspends the calling process until one of its children changes state; if a child process changed state prior to the call to waitpid(), return is immediate. pid specifies a set of child processes for which status is requested.

: If pid is equal to (pid_t)-1, status is requested for any child process.
: If pid is greater than (pid_t)0, it specifies the process ID of the child process for which status is requested.
: If pid is equal to (pid_t)0 status is requested for any child process whose process group ID is equal to that of the calling process.
: If pid is less than (pid_t)-1, status is requested for any child process whose process group ID is equal to the absolute value of pid.

If waitpid() returns because the status of a child process is available, then that status may be evaluated with the macros defined by wstat.5 If the calling process had specified a non-zero value of stat_loc, the status of the child process will be stored in the location pointed to by stat_loc.

The options argument is constructed from the bitwise inclusive OR of zero or more of the following flags, defined in the header <sys/wait.h>:

WCONTINUED: The status of any continued child process specified by pid, whose status has not been reported since it continued, is also reported to the calling process.
WNOHANG: waitpid() will not suspend execution of the calling process if status is not immediately available for one of the child processes specified by pid.
WNOWAIT: Keep the process whose status is returned in stat_loc in a waitable state. The process may be waited for again with identical results.
WUNTRACED: The status of any child processes specified by pid that are stopped, and whose status has not yet been reported since they stopped, is also reported to the calling process.

waitpid() with options equal to 0 and pid equal to (pid_t)-1 is identical to a call to wait.2

RETURN VALUES

If waitpid() returns because the status of a child process is available, this function returns a value equal to the process ID of the child process for which status is reported. If waitpid() returns due to the delivery of a signal to the calling process, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to EINTR. If this 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 0 is returned. Otherwise, a value of -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

waitpid() will fail if one or more of the following is true: