Procwait is a program that blocks until processes it tracks terminate. It is
analogous to wait but is used to wait for any processes, not only its own
children. When all of the tracked processes terminate, procwait terminates too.
Procwait is a Linux program written in C99.
A process is perceived to be running if there exists a directory called
/proc/PID. However, simply relying on polling whether the directory still
exists is racy: the tracked process can terminate and a new process can spawn
with the same PID between polls. It may not be very likely in most use-cases as
there are /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max available PIDs, but it is possible.
To reduce the possibility of a race condition procwait records the name and the
start time of the tracked process at startup. The content of /proc/PID/stat
is read every time a process is polled, and if the process' start time or the
process' name doesn't match the recorded information the tracked process is
considered terminated.
The intended workflow expects a make utility. Edit the config.mk file to suit
your system, and build the program by running
$ make
The Makefile also has install and uninstall targets. After you have adjusted the variables in config.mk and build the program you can install it by issuing
$ make install
and uninstall with
$ make uninstall
For information about the program usage and options see the procwait manpage procwait.1. Man page is generated when you build the program or you can build it separately by running
$ make procwait.1
If you have found a bug in the program, please report it to the author directly. See AUTHOR section below for contact information.
Written by Tuomo Hartikainen tth@harski.org.
Licensed under the 2-clause BSD license. See the supplied LICENSE file for details.