waitpid(1) — Linux manual page

WAITPID(1)                    User Commands                    WAITPID(1)

NAME         top

       waitpid - utility to wait for arbitrary processes

SYNOPSIS         top

       waitpid [-v] [--timeout|-t seconds] PID[:inode]...

DESCRIPTION         top

       waitpid is a simple command to wait for arbitrary non-child
       processes.

       It exits after all processes whose PIDs have been passed as
       arguments have exited.

       Optionally, a process can be addressed with the format PID:inode.
       The inode identifies the unique process’s file descriptor. To
       retrieve a process’s inode number you can use the getino(1)
       utility.

OPTIONS         top

       -v, --verbose
           Be more verbose.

       -t, --timeout seconds
           Maximum wait time.

       -e, --exited
           Don’t error on already exited PIDs.

       -c, --count count
           Number of process exits to wait for.

       -h, --help
           Display help text and exit.

       -V, --version
           Display version and exit.

EXIT STATUS         top

       waitpid has the following exit status values:

       0
           success

       1
           unspecified failure

       2
           system does not provide necessary functionality

       3
           timeout expired

AUTHORS         top

       Thomas Weißschuh <thomas@t-8ch.de>

SEE ALSO         top

       waitpid(2), wait(1P), getino(1)

REPORTING BUGS         top

       For bug reports, use the issue tracker
       <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux/issues>.

AVAILABILITY         top

       The waitpid command is part of the util-linux package which can be
       downloaded from Linux Kernel Archive
       <https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/>. This page is
       part of the util-linux (a random collection of Linux utilities)
       project. Information about the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. If you have a
       bug report for this manual page, send it to
       util-linux@vger.kernel.org. This page was obtained from the
       project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git⟩ on
       2026-05-24. (At that time, the date of the most recent commit that
       was found in the repository was 2026-05-20.) If you discover any
       rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
       believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page,
       or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
       COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a
       mail to man-pages@man7.org

util-linux 2.43.devel-739-eee2e 2026-05-24                     WAITPID(1)

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