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PWAIT(1) General Commands Manual PWAIT(1) NAME pwait -- wait for processes to terminate SYNOPSIS pwait [-t duration] [-opv] pid ... DESCRIPTION The pwait utility will wait until each of the given processes has termi- nated. The following option is available: -o Exit when any of the given processes has terminated. -p On exit, print a list of processes that have not terminated. -t duration If any process is still running after duration, pwait will exit. The duration value can be integer or decimal numbers. Values with- out unit symbols are interpreted as seconds. Supported unit symbols are: s seconds m minutes h hours -v Print the exit status when each process terminates or `timeout' if the timer goes off earlier. EXIT STATUS The pwait utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. If the -t flag is specified and a timeout occurs, the exit status will be 124. Invalid pids elicit a warning message but are otherwise ignored. EXAMPLES Start two sleep(1) processes in the background. The first one will sleep for 30 seconds and the second one for one hour. Wait for any of them to finish but no more than 5 seconds. Since a timeout occurs the exit status is 124: $ sleep 30 & sleep 3600 & [1] 1646 [2] 1647 $ pwait -o -t5 1646 1647 $ echo $? 124 Same as above but try to obtain the exit status of the processes. In this case `timeout' is shown and the exit status is 124: $ sleep 30 & sleep 3600 & [1] 1652 [2] 1653 $ pwait -v -t 5 1652 1653 timeout $ echo $? 124 Start two sleep(1) processes in the background sleeping for 30 and 40 sec- onds respectively. Wait 60 seconds for any of them to finish and get their exit codes: $ sleep 30 & sleep 40 & [1] 1674 [2] 1675 $ pwait -v -t 60 1674 1675 1674: exited with status 0. 1675: exited with status 0. [1]- Done sleep 30 [2]+ Done sleep 40 $ echo $? 0 SEE ALSO kill(1), pkill(1), ps(1), wait(1), kqueue(2) NOTES pwait is not a substitute for the wait(1) builtin as it will not clean up any zombies or state in the parent process. To avoid deadlock, pwait will ignore its own pid, if it is provided as a process id to wait for. HISTORY A pwait command first appeared in SunOS 5.8. FreeBSD ports 15.1 October 22, 2025 PWAIT(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EXIT STATUS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | NOTES | HISTORY
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