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   wait.3p    ( 3 )

подождите, пока дочерний процесс остановится или завершится (wait for a child process to stop or terminate)

Обоснование (Rationale)

A call to the wait() or waitpid() function only returns status on an immediate child process of the calling process; that is, a child that was produced by a single fork() call (perhaps followed by an exec or other function calls) from the parent. If a child produces grandchildren by further use of fork(), none of those grandchildren nor any of their descendants affect the behavior of a wait() from the original parent process. Nothing in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 prevents an implementation from providing extensions that permit a process to get status from a grandchild or any other process, but a process that does not use such extensions must be guaranteed to see status from only its direct children.

The waitpid() function is provided for three reasons:

1. To support job control

2. To permit a non-blocking version of the wait() function

3. To permit a library routine, such as system() or pclose(), to wait for its children without interfering with other terminated children for which the process has not waited

The first two of these facilities are based on the wait3() function provided by 4.3 BSD. The function uses the options argument, which is equivalent to an argument to wait3(). The WUNTRACED flag is used only in conjunction with job control on systems supporting job control. Its name comes from 4.3 BSD and refers to the fact that there are two types of stopped processes in that implementation: processes being traced via the ptrace() debugging facility and (untraced) processes stopped by job control signals. Since ptrace() is not part of this volume of POSIX.1‐2017, only the second type is relevant. The name WUNTRACED was retained because its usage is the same, even though the name is not intuitively meaningful in this context.

The third reason for the waitpid() function is to permit independent sections of a process to spawn and wait for children without interfering with each other. For example, the following problem occurs in developing a portable shell, or command interpreter:

stream = popen("/bin/true"); (void) system("sleep 100"); (void) pclose(stream);

On all historical implementations, the final pclose() fails to reap the wait() status of the popen().

The status values are retrieved by macros, rather than given as specific bit encodings as they are in most historical implementations (and thus expected by existing programs). This was necessary to eliminate a limitation on the number of signals an implementation can support that was inherent in the traditional encodings. This volume of POSIX.1‐2017 does require that a status value of zero corresponds to a process calling _exit(0), as this is the most common encoding expected by existing programs. Some of the macro names were adopted from 4.3 BSD.

These macros syntactically operate on an arbitrary integer value. The behavior is undefined unless that value is one stored by a successful call to wait() or waitpid() in the location pointed to by the stat_loc argument. An early proposal attempted to make this clearer by specifying each argument as *stat_loc rather than stat_val. However, that did not follow the conventions of other specifications in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 or traditional usage. It also could have implied that the argument to the macro must literally be *stat_loc; in fact, that value can be stored or passed as an argument to other functions before being interpreted by these macros.

The extension that affects wait() and waitpid() and is common in historical implementations is the ptrace() function. It is called by a child process and causes that child to stop and return a status that appears identical to the status indicated by WIFSTOPPED. The status of ptrace() children is traditionally returned regardless of the WUNTRACED flag (or by the wait() function). Most applications do not need to concern themselves with such extensions because they have control over what extensions they or their children use. However, applications, such as command interpreters, that invoke arbitrary processes may see this behavior when those arbitrary processes misuse such extensions.

Implementations that support core file creation or other implementation-defined actions on termination of some processes traditionally provide a bit in the status returned by wait() to indicate that such actions have occurred.

Allowing the wait() family of functions to discard a pending SIGCHLD signal that is associated with a successfully waited-for child process puts them into the sigwait() and sigwaitinfo() category with respect to SIGCHLD.

This definition allows implementations to treat a pending SIGCHLD signal as accepted by the process in wait(), with the same meaning of ``accepted'' as when that word is applied to the sigwait() family of functions.

Allowing the wait() family of functions to behave this way permits an implementation to be able to deal precisely with SIGCHLD signals.

In particular, an implementation that does accept (discard) the SIGCHLD signal can make the following guarantees regardless of the queuing depth of signals in general (the list of waitable children can hold the SIGCHLD queue):

1. If a SIGCHLD signal handler is established via sigaction() without the SA_RESETHAND flag, SIGCHLD signals can be accurately counted; that is, exactly one SIGCHLD signal will be delivered to or accepted by the process for every child process that terminates.

2. A single wait() issued from a SIGCHLD signal handler can be guaranteed to return immediately with status information for a child process.

3. When SA_SIGINFO is requested, the SIGCHLD signal handler can be guaranteed to receive a non-null pointer to a siginfo_t structure that describes a child process for which a wait via waitpid() or waitid() will not block or fail.

4. The system() function will not cause the SIGCHLD handler of a process to be called as a result of the fork()/exec executed within system() because system() will accept the SIGCHLD signal when it performs a waitpid() for its child process. This is a desirable behavior of system() so that it can be used in a library without causing side-effects to the application linked with the library.

An implementation that does not permit the wait() family of functions to accept (discard) a pending SIGCHLD signal associated with a successfully waited-for child, cannot make the guarantees described above for the following reasons:

Guarantee #1 Although it might be assumed that reliable queuing of all SIGCHLD signals generated by the system can make this guarantee, the counter-example is the case of a process that blocks SIGCHLD and performs an indefinite loop of fork()/wait() operations. If the implementation supports queued signals, then eventually the system will run out of memory for the queue. The guarantee cannot be made because there must be some limit to the depth of queuing.

Guarantees #2 and #3 These cannot be guaranteed unless the wait() family of functions accepts the SIGCHLD signal. Otherwise, a fork()/wait() executed while SIGCHLD is blocked (as in the system() function) will result in an invocation of the handler when SIGCHLD is unblocked, after the process has disappeared.

Guarantee #4 Although possible to make this guarantee, system() would have to set the SIGCHLD handler to SIG_DFL so that the SIGCHLD signal generated by its fork() would be discarded (the SIGCHLD default action is to be ignored), then restore it to its previous setting. This would have the undesirable side-effect of discarding all SIGCHLD signals pending to the process.