procwait Command

Purpose

Waits for all of the specified processes to terminate.

Syntax

procwait [ -v ] ProcessID ...

Description

The /proc filesystem provides a mechanism to control processes. It also gives access to information about the current state of processes and threads, but in binary form. The proctools commands provide ASCII reports based on some of the available information.

Most of the commands take a list of process IDs or /proc/ProcessID strings as input. The shell expansion /proc/* can therefore be used to specify all processes in the system.

Each of the proctools commands gathers information from /proc for the specified processes and displays it to the user. The proctools commands like procrun and procstop start and stop a process using the /proc interface.

The information gathered by the commands from /proc is a snapshot of the current state of processes, and therefore can vary at any instant except for stopped processes.

The procwait command waits for all of the specified processes to terminate.

Flags

Item Description
-v Specifies verbose output. Reports terminations to standard output.
ProcessID Specifies the process id.

Examples

  1. To wait for process 12942 to exit and display the status, enter: 
    procwait -v 12942
    The output of this command might look like this: 
    12942 : terminated, exit status 0

Files

Item Description
/proc Contains the /proc filesystem.