waitpid

waitpid pid, flags

• Waits for a particular child process pid to terminate and returns the pid when the process is dead, or -1 if there are no child processes or if the flags specify non-blocking and the process isn't dead yet. The status of the dead process is returned in $?. To get valid flag values say this:
  
  

  use POSIX "sys_wait_h";
  

  
  
  On systems that implement neither the waitpid(2) nor the wait4(2) system call, flags may be specified only as 0. In other words, you can wait for a specific pid, but you can't do it in non-blocking mode.