# Wait built-in

The wait built-in waits for jobs to terminate.

## Syntax

- `wait [job…]`

## Description

The wait built-in waits for background jobs to terminate. If job control is enabled, stopped jobs are considered as terminated.

The built-in can be used to wait for asynchronous commands if job control is disabled.

If the shell receives a signal while the built-in is waiting and if a trap has been set for the signal, then the trap is executed and the built-in immediately finishes (without waiting for the jobs). If the shell receives a SIGINT signal when job control is enabled, the built-in aborts waiting.

## Operands

job

  The job ID of the job or the process ID of a process in the job.

If no jobs are specified, the built-in waits for all existing jobs.

If the specified job does not exist, the job is considered to have terminated with the exit status of 127.

## Exit status

If no jobs were specified and the built-in successfully waited for all the jobs, the exit status is zero. If one or more jobs were specified, the exit status is that of the last job.

If the built-in was aborted by a signal, the exit status is an integer (> 128) that denotes the signal. If there was any other error, the exit status is between 1 and 126 (inclusive).

## Notes

The wait built-in is a semi-special built-in.

The process ID of the last process of a job can be obtained by the `!` special parameter. You can use the jobs built-in as well to obtain process IDs of job processes.