wait

Both TclX and Expect implement the Unix-familiar fork/exec/wait interfaces, more-or-less. How can core Tcl get along without them? Its exec and open interfaces are slightly higher-level abstractions that make more sense across platforms, and have proven to be quite apt for development. Note, in particular, that [... exec reaps from ...].

The TclX package provides the command with this syntax:

wait ?-nohang? ?-untraced? ?-pgroup? ?pid?

Waits for a process (created with fork, exec or open) to terminate, whether by signal or by a call to exit. If pid is given, wait for that specific process, and otherwise wait for any child process. This will also pick up exit codes from already-terminated processes (“zombies”). Note that exec and open will automatically reap the zombies they create with repeated use; there is no guarantee that you will be able to manually wait for the processes they create.

Options:

• If -nohang is given, don't actually wait for anything: just return a list of info about current zombies which then cease to be.
• If -untraced is given, report on newly-stopped processes as well.
• If -pgroup is given, wait for processes in the current process's process group or in the process group given by pid (which is interpreted as a process group id, not a process id).

The result of wait is a list of three elements (per reaped process):

pid type code

Pid is the exit code. If the process exited normally, type is EXIT and code is the exit code. If the process terminated due to a signal, type is SIG and code is the signal name. If the process is stopped, type is STOP and code is the signal that caused it to suspend.