Is there a system call to check the status of any processes?

[Guy Harris]

 > Isn't there any more graceful way to do this? I looked the HP-UX manual and
 >it turned out they had something called waitpid(pid,stat_loc,opt) that can
 >be used to wait for one (out of many) child process.

Unfortunately, "this" is checking for the status of a process that's
*not* a child of the checker, so "waitpid()" won't help you a bit.