wait

When an asynchronous list (see Asynchronous Lists ) is started by the shell, the process ID of the last command in each element of the asynchronous list shall become known in the current shell execution environment; see Shell Execution Environment . If the wait utility is invoked with no operands, it shall wait until all process IDs known to the invoking shell have terminated and exit with a zero exit status. If one or more pid operands are specified that represent known process IDs, the wait utility shall wait until all of them have terminated. If one or more pid operands are specified that represent unknown process IDs, wait shall treat them as if they were known process IDs that exited with exit status 127. The exit status returned by the wait utility shall be the exit status of the process requested by the last pid operand. The known process IDs are applicable only for invocations of wait in the current shell execution environment. The job control job ID type of pid is only available on systems supporting the User Portability Utilities option. Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See XBD Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.) If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables. Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error. [XSI) ] ![[Option Start]]( Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC MESSAGES. ![[Option End]]( If one or more operands were specified, all of them have terminated or were not known by the invoking shell, and the status of the last operand specified is known, then the exit status of wait shall be the exit status information of the command indicated by the last operand specified. If the process terminated abnormally due to the receipt of a signal, the exit status shall be greater than 128 and shall be distinct from the exit status generated by other signals, but the exact value is unspecified. (See the kill -l option.) Otherwise, the wait utility shall exit with one of the following values: The wait utility was invoked with no operands and all process IDs known by the invoking shell have terminated. it returns immediately because there are no known process IDs to wait for in those environments. Historical implementations of interactive shells have discarded the exit status of terminated background processes before each shell prompt. Therefore, the status of background processes was usually lost unless it terminated while wait was waiting for it. This could be a serious problem when a job that was expected to run for a long time actually terminated quickly with a syntax or initialization error because the exit status returned was usually zero if the requested process ID was not found. This volume of POSIX.1-2017 requires the implementation to keep the status of terminated jobs available until the status is requested, so that scripts like: work without losing status on any of the jobs. The shell is allowed to discard the status of any process if it determines that the application cannot get the process ID for that process from the shell. It is also required to remember only {CHILD MAX} number of processes in this way. Since the only way to get the process ID from the shell is by using the '!' shell parameter, the shell is allowed to discard the status of an asynchronous list if "$!" was not referenced before another asynchronous list was started. (This means that the shell only has to keep the status of the last asynchronous list started if the application did not reference "$!". If the implementation of the shell is smart enough to determine that a reference to "$!" was not saved anywhere that the application can retrieve it later, it can use this information to trim the list of saved informati