Name
wait
Synopsis
wait
Description
Waits for a child process to terminate and returns the
pid of the deceased process, or -1
if there are no child processes.
The status is returned in $?
.
If you get zombie child processes, you should be calling either this function
or waitpid
. A common strategy to avoid such zombies is:
$SIG{CHLD} = sub { wait };
If you expected a child and didn’t find it, you probably had a
call to system
, a close on a pipe, or backticks between
the fork
and the wait
. These constructs also do a
wait(2)
and may have harvested your child process.
Use waitpid
to avoid this problem.
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