How to wait for exit of non-children processes

c linux process wait
CsTamas picture CsTamas · Jul 21, 2009 · Viewed 17.3k times · Source

For child processes, the wait() and waitpid() functions can be used to suspends execution of the current process until a child has exited. But this function can not be used for non-child processes.

Is there another function, which can wait for exit of any process ?

Answer

chaos picture chaos · Jul 21, 2009

Nothing equivalent to wait(). The usual practice is to poll using kill(pid, 0) and looking for return value -1 and errno of ESRCH to indicate that the process is gone.

Update: Since linux kernel 5.3 there is a pidfd_open syscall, which creates an fd for a given pid, which can be polled to get notification when pid has exited.

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