| WAIT(2) | Linux Programmer's Manual | WAIT(2) |
wait, waitpid, waitid - wait for process to change state
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/wait.h>
pid_t wait(int *wstatus);
pid_t waitpid(pid_t pid, int *wstatus, int options);
int waitid(idtype_t idtype, id_t
id, siginfo_t *infop, int
options);
/* This is the glibc and POSIX interface; see
NOTES for information on the raw system call. */
waitid():
All of these system calls are used to wait for state changes in a child of the calling process, and obtain information about the child whose state has changed. A state change is considered to be: the child terminated; the child was stopped by a signal; or the child was resumed by a signal. In the case of a terminated child, performing a wait allows the system to release the resources associated with the child; if a wait is not performed, then the terminated child remains in a "zombie" state (see NOTES below).
If a child has already changed state, then these calls return immediately. Otherwise, they block until either a child changes state or a signal handler interrupts the call (assuming that system calls are not automatically restarted using the SA_RESTART flag of sigaction(2)). In the remainder of this page, a child whose state has changed and which has not yet been waited upon by one of these system calls is termed waitable.
The wait() system call suspends execution of the calling thread until one of its children terminates. The call wait(&wstatus) is equivalent to:
waitpid(-1, &wstatus, 0);
The waitpid() system call suspends execution of the calling thread until a child specified by pid argument has changed state. By default, waitpid() waits only for terminated children, but this behavior is modifiable via the options argument, as described below.
The value of pid can be:
The value of options is an OR of zero or more of the following constants:
(For Linux-only options, see below.)
If wstatus is not NULL, wait() and waitpid() store status information in the int to which it points. This integer can be inspected with the following macros (which take the integer itself as an argument, not a pointer to it, as is done in wait() and waitpid()!):
The waitid() system call (available since Linux 2.6.9) provides more precise control over which child state changes to wait for.
The idtype and id arguments select the child(ren) to wait for, as follows:
The child state changes to wait for are specified by ORing one or more of the following flags in options:
The following flags may additionally be ORed in options:
Upon successful return, waitid() fills in the following fields of the siginfo_t structure pointed to by infop:
If WNOHANG was specified in options and there were no children in a waitable state, then waitid() returns 0 immediately and the state of the siginfo_t structure pointed to by infop depends on the implementation. To (portably) distinguish this case from that where a child was in a waitable state, zero out the si_pid field before the call and check for a nonzero value in this field after the call returns.
POSIX.1-2008 Technical Corrigendum 1 (2013) adds the requirement that when WNOHANG is specified in options and there were no children in a waitable state, then waitid() should zero out the si_pid and si_signo fields of the structure. On Linux and other implementations that adhere to this requirement, it is not necessary to zero out the si_pid field before calling waitid(). However, not all implementations follow the POSIX.1 specification on this point.
wait(): on success, returns the process ID of the terminated child; on error, -1 is returned.
waitpid(): on success, returns the process ID of the child whose state has changed; if WNOHANG was specified and one or more child(ren) specified by pid exist, but have not yet changed state, then 0 is returned. On error, -1 is returned.
waitid(): returns 0 on success or if WNOHANG was specified and no child(ren) specified by id has yet changed state; on error, -1 is returned.
Each of these calls sets errno to an appropriate value in the case of an error.
SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
A child that terminates, but has not been waited for becomes a "zombie". The kernel maintains a minimal set of information about the zombie process (PID, termination status, resource usage information) in order to allow the parent to later perform a wait to obtain information about the child. As long as a zombie is not removed from the system via a wait, it will consume a slot in the kernel process table, and if this table fills, it will not be possible to create further processes. If a parent process terminates, then its "zombie" children (if any) are adopted by init(1), (or by the nearest "subreaper" process as defined through the use of the prctl(2) PR_SET_CHILD_SUBREAPER operation); init(1) automatically performs a wait to remove the zombies.
POSIX.1-2001 specifies that if the disposition of SIGCHLD is set to SIG_IGN or the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag is set for SIGCHLD (see sigaction(2)), then children that terminate do not become zombies and a call to wait() or waitpid() will block until all children have terminated, and then fail with errno set to ECHILD. (The original POSIX standard left the behavior of setting SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN unspecified. Note that even though the default disposition of SIGCHLD is "ignore", explicitly setting the disposition to SIG_IGN results in different treatment of zombie process children.)
Linux 2.6 conforms to the POSIX requirements. However, Linux 2.4 (and earlier) does not: if a wait() or waitpid() call is made while SIGCHLD is being ignored, the call behaves just as though SIGCHLD were not being ignored, that is, the call blocks until the next child terminates and then returns the process ID and status of that child.
In the Linux kernel, a kernel-scheduled thread is not a distinct construct from a process. Instead, a thread is simply a process that is created using the Linux-unique clone(2) system call; other routines such as the portable pthread_create(3) call are implemented using clone(2). Before Linux 2.4, a thread was just a special case of a process, and as a consequence one thread could not wait on the children of another thread, even when the latter belongs to the same thread group. However, POSIX prescribes such functionality, and since Linux 2.4 a thread can, and by default will, wait on children of other threads in the same thread group.
The following Linux-specific options are for use with children created using clone(2); they can also, since Linux 4.7, be used with waitid():
Since Linux 4.7, the __WALL flag is automatically implied if the child is being ptraced.
wait() is actually a library function that (in glibc) is implemented as a call to wait4(2).
On some architectures, there is no waitpid() system call; instead, this interface is implemented via a C library wrapper function that calls wait4(2).
The raw waitid() system call takes a fifth argument, of type struct rusage *. If this argument is non-NULL, then it is used to return resource usage information about the child, in the same manner as wait4(2). See getrusage(2) for details.
According to POSIX.1-2008, an application calling waitid() must ensure that infop points to a siginfo_t structure (i.e., that it is a non-null pointer). On Linux, if infop is NULL, waitid() succeeds, and returns the process ID of the waited-for child. Applications should avoid relying on this inconsistent, nonstandard, and unnecessary feature.
The following program demonstrates the use of fork(2) and waitpid(). The program creates a child process. If no command-line argument is supplied to the program, then the child suspends its execution using pause(2), to allow the user to send signals to the child. Otherwise, if a command-line argument is supplied, then the child exits immediately, using the integer supplied on the command line as the exit status. The parent process executes a loop that monitors the child using waitpid(), and uses the W*() macros described above to analyze the wait status value.
The following shell session demonstrates the use of the program:
$ ./a.out & Child PID is 32360 [1] 32359 $ kill -STOP 32360 stopped by signal 19 $ kill -CONT 32360 continued $ kill -TERM 32360 killed by signal 15 [1]+ Done ./a.out $
#include <sys/wait.h>
#include <stdint.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
pid_t cpid, w;
int wstatus;
cpid = fork();
if (cpid == -1) {
perror("fork");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (cpid == 0) { /* Code executed by child */
printf("Child PID is %jd\n", (intmax_t) getpid());
if (argc == 1)
pause(); /* Wait for signals */
_exit(atoi(argv[1]));
} else { /* Code executed by parent */
do {
w = waitpid(cpid, &wstatus, WUNTRACED | WCONTINUED);
if (w == -1) {
perror("waitpid");
exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
}
if (WIFEXITED(wstatus)) {
printf("exited, status=%d\n", WEXITSTATUS(wstatus));
} else if (WIFSIGNALED(wstatus)) {
printf("killed by signal %d\n", WTERMSIG(wstatus));
} else if (WIFSTOPPED(wstatus)) {
printf("stopped by signal %d\n", WSTOPSIG(wstatus));
} else if (WIFCONTINUED(wstatus)) {
printf("continued\n");
}
} while (!WIFEXITED(wstatus) && !WIFSIGNALED(wstatus));
exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
}
_exit(2), clone(2), fork(2), kill(2), ptrace(2), sigaction(2), signal(2), wait4(2), pthread_create(3), core(5), credentials(7), signal(7)
This page is part of release 5.10 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
| 2020-11-01 | Linux |