You are viewing the version of this documentation from Perl 5.8.2. View the latest version
wait

Behaves like the wait(2) system call on your system: it waits for a child process to terminate and returns the pid of the deceased process, or -1 if there are no child processes. The status is returned in $?. Note that a return value of -1 could mean that child processes are being automatically reaped, as described in perlipc.