WAIT(1)

✨ WAIT — wait for jobs to complete ✨

okay bestie so this is the fish-shell builtin wait, page WAIT(1), and it's genuinely one of those tiny commands that carries the whole vibe of background jobs 💅

🫶 NOTE: this page documents the fish builtin wait. Wanna see the docs for any of the non-fish versions? Just run command man wait instead. iykyk ✨

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

wait [-n | --any] [PID | PROCESS_NAME] ...

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

wait waits for child jobs to complete. that's it, that's the whole thing, and honestly? iconic. 👑

• if a PID is specified, the command waits for the job that the process with that process ID belongs to. so like, you point at a process, and it waits on the job that process is part of, not just the process alone. 🦋
• if a PROCESS_NAME is specified, the command waits for the jobs that the matched processes belong to. (yes, plural — it matches processes, then waits on their jobs 🎀)
• if you specify neither a pid nor a process name, the command waits for all background jobs. all of them. every single one. no job left behind 😭
• if the -n or --any flag is provided, the command returns as soon as the first job completes 🔥 if it's not provided, it returns after all jobs complete. so -n is the "i'm impatient, give me whoever finishes first" mode fr fr
• the -h or --help option displays help about using this command 🌸

🌈 EXAMPLE 🌈

first up, spawn sleep in the background and then wait until it finishes:

sleep 10 &
wait $last_pid

okay but what if you've got a whole little squad of jobs? 💀 this spawns five jobs in the background, then waits until all of them finish:

for i in (seq 1 5); sleep 10 &; end
wait

and the main character move 👑 — this spawns five sleep jobs and hoge in the background, then waits until all the sleeps finish, and doesn't wait for hoge:

for i in (seq 1 5); sleep 10 &; end
hoge &
wait sleep

see how wait sleep only cares about the sleeps? selective attention, we stan 🧚

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📜 Copyright 📜

fish-shell developers 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie — this was WAIT(1) for fish-shell, version 4.9, dated Sep 08, 2026, and yes the header says WAIT(1) too, we love a consistent queen 💜🌸✨