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In computer operating systems, a process (or task) may wait for another process to complete its execution. In most systems, a parent process can create an independently executing child process . The parent process may then issue a wait system call , which suspends the execution of the parent process while the child executes.
In Unix and other POSIX-compatible systems, the parent process can retrieve the exit status of a child process using the wait() family of system calls defined in wait.h. [10] Of these, the waitid() [11] call retrieves the full exit status, but the older wait() and waitpid() [12] calls retrieve only the least significant 8 bits of the exit status.
Since issuing the HLT instruction requires ring 0 access, it can only be run by privileged system software such as the kernel. Because of this, it is often best practice in application programming to use the application programming interface (API) provided for that purpose by the operating system when no more work can be done, such as Linux's ...
However, the process's entry in the process table remains. The parent can read the child's exit status by executing the wait system call, whereupon the zombie is removed. The wait call may be executed in sequential code, but it is commonly executed in a handler for the SIGCHLD signal, which the parent receives whenever a child has died.
A sleep command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2. [8] In PowerShell, sleep is a predefined command alias for the Start-Sleep cmdlet which serves the same purpose. [9] Microsoft also provides a sleep resource kit tool for Windows which can be used in batch files or the command prompt to pause the execution and wait ...
Expect is an extension to the Tcl scripting language written by Don Libes. [2] The program automates interactions with programs that expose a text terminal interface. Expect, originally written in 1990 for the Unix platform, has since become available for Microsoft Windows and other systems.
A simple way to understand wait (P) and signal (V) operations is: wait: Decrements the value of the semaphore variable by 1. If the new value of the semaphore variable is negative, the process executing wait is blocked (i.e., added to the semaphore's queue). Otherwise, the process continues execution, having used a unit of the resource.
wait normally returns the exit status of the last job which terminated. It may also return 127 in the event that n specifies a non-existent job or zero if there were no jobs to wait for. Because wait needs to be aware of the job table of the current shell execution environment, it is usually implemented as a shell builtin .