.Dd September 3, 1996
.Dt WAIT-FOR 1
.Os NetBSD 1.2BETA
.Sh NAME
.Nm wait-for
.Nd wait for process(es) to die
.Sh SYNOPSIS
.Nm
.Ar pid
.Op Ar pid ...
.Sh DESCRIPTION
.Nm
waits until all the processes whose process IDs (see
.Xr intro 2 )
are listed on the command line have died; at that point, it exits (with
status 0).
.Pp
The only failure modes possible for
.Nm
are:
.Bl -bullet -offset indent
.It
A non-number as an argument (see
.Xr strtol 3 ) .
.It
An out-of-range number as an argument (valid process IDs range from 1
to 30000).
.El
.\" Grrr, why does .Bl/.El produce a blank line before but not after?
\ \&
.br
These conditions are checked at initial startup and will produce an
immediate exit with exit code 1.
.Sh BUGS
.Nm
checks only every 15 seconds to see if any more of the processes it's
watching have died.  If a specified process dies and its process ID
gets reused for another process before
.Nm
next checks, the death and restart will not be noticed.  (There is no
problem if the process ID gets reused later than that, because once
.Nm
notices a process die, it remembers that that process is gone and no
longer checks it.)
.Sh AUTHOR
der Mouse,
.Aq mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca .