wait ((char *) 0)

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <1886 at loral.UUCP> jlh at loral.UUCP writes:
>In all his examples [the professor] used wait ( (char *) 0).
>I pointed out to him that wait wanted an address in which to stuff a result,
>and using 0 was probably not a good idea.

Passing a NULL pointer to a function is occasionally used to mean
"don't return anything here this time".  My 4.3BSD manual allows
wait(0).  [This probably ought to be wait((union wait *)0) ].

Take a look also at the time() system call.

This is really a UNIX issue, and not a generic C issue.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi