26.1. Waiting on a Child Process

In many applications where a parent creates child processes, it is useful for the parent to be able to monitor the children to find out when and how they terminate. This facility is provided by wait() and a number of related system calls.

26.1.1. The wait() System Call

The wait() system call waits for one of the children of the calling process to terminate and returns the termination status of that child in the buffer pointed to by status.