Reference: wait
Author: Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour & Nathan Patwardhan
Date: 1999-07-02T01:39:24Z

#

| Chapter 5 Function Reference |

## wait

    wait

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.

Reference: vec |  | Reference: waitpid