PWAIT(1)

👑 PWAIT — wait for processes to terminate

okay bestie so like. pwait is a whole vibe and it's lowkey the chillest little command in the General Commands Manual section. it just… waits. that's it. that's the job. ✨

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🦋 SYNOPSIS

pwait [-v] [-c] pid ...

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🌸 DESCRIPTION

pwait sits there and waits until each of the given processes has terminated. like a patient bestie holding your bag outside the dressing room. no cap. 💅

the options are as follows, and yes we're going through all of them because there are literally two and they're both important:

✨ OPTIONS

• -v — prints the exit status of each process when it terminates. so you actually get to see what happened instead of just vibing in silence. 👀
• -c — returns 111 if any process exited non-successfully. it's giving "snitch mode" and honestly? iconic. 🔥

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💀 EXIT STATUS

the pwait utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

invalid pids elicit a warning message but are otherwise ignored — so like, it'll side-eye them but it won't make it a whole thing. 🙈

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😭 ERRORS

if you see this error, check these prerequisites, bestie:

binding sk_nl error: Operation not permitted

pwait requires special permissions to run, either root or the Linux CAP_NET_ADMIN capability. no permission no party, fr fr.

also pwait only works on Linux kernels with the kernel options:

CONFIG_CONNECTOR=y
CONFIG_PROC_EVENTS=y

so if your kernel doesn't have those, it's over. genuinely over. don't fight it. 💀

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🫶 SEE ALSO

extrace(1), kill(1), pkill(1), ps(1), wait(1)

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👑 AUTHORS

Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>

built upon code from FreeBSD pwait written by Jilles Tjoelker. shoutout to the OGs. 🫶

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🌈 LICENSE

pwait is licensed under the terms of the GPLv2.

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and that's the whole page, bestie 🎀 this one came from Debian, dated September 17, 2018 — go forth and wait on some processes, you absolute main character. ✨💖