Python Documentation Refers You To Docs for "the C function wait." Where is that?

Question

There's multiple places in the Python documentation where it refers you to the C function "wait." For instance: "The exit status for the command can be interpreted according to the rules for the C function wait," in the commands and subprocess modules.

Where can I find this documentation? Apparently my Google-fu is not strong enough, or it's late enough at night that I'm being dumb. (But I figure this is probably a question that should be in Stack Overflow anyway.)

Answer 1

$ man 2 wait (on Linux and Unix systems).

Answer 2

A search for man wait gives this as the top hit -- man is the Unix command for getting the manual page of something, so a search for man foobar is likely to reveal manual pages for foobar that happen to be online.

Answer 3

http://www.manpagez.com/man/2/wait/

(and at many other sources of man pages on the Internet).

Answer 4

Here are some online pages for Linux...

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jaunty/en/man2/wait.2.html

Sometimes the BSD pages have fewer extensions. They aren't always closer to pure posix but they are sometimes more "common denominator unix".

http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?wait+2+NetBSD-current

There was a time that man 2 wait would give you the answer on every unix box. However, these days the man pages are typically an optional package which you will have to hunt down, or at least identify its name. Because these change slightly over time they are associated with a given release of the OS, so there is no central authority. For typical use today in process management with scripting languages you may want to actually check with one of the various standards bodies, perhaps at http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/wait.html Finally, I should add that you can get these for cygwin on windows.