How to make parent wait for all child processes to finish?

Donatello picture Donatello · Oct 19, 2013 · Viewed 165.5k times · Source

I'm hoping someone could shed some light on how to make the parent wait for ALL child processes to finish before continuing after the fork. I have cleanup code which I want to run but the child processes need to have returned before this can happen.

for (int id=0; id<n; id++) {
  if (fork()==0) {
    // Child
    exit(0);      
  } else {
    // Parent
    ...
  }
  ...
}

Answer

adrisons picture adrisons · May 26, 2014
pid_t child_pid, wpid;
int status = 0;

//Father code (before child processes start)

for (int id=0; id<n; id++) {
    if ((child_pid = fork()) == 0) {
        //child code
        exit(0);
    }
}

while ((wpid = wait(&status)) > 0); // this way, the father waits for all the child processes 

//Father code (After all child processes end)

wait waits for a child process to terminate, and returns that child process's pid. On error (eg when there are no child processes), -1 is returned. So, basically, the code keeps waiting for child processes to finish, until the waiting errors out, and then you know they are all finished.