I may have answered my own question... I still can't figure out how to get it to work with waitpid but it does work properly when using just plain "wait". The reason I wasn't doing that before is that it is a blocking call so it prevents me from looping through checking each PID I kicked off previously. However, it seems that it blocks until any of the processes returns. The wait call itself returns the PID that just terminated and just after $? returns the status. So presumably I can collect all my PIDs as I kick them off then loop through on a blocking wait one by one waiting for each of those PIDs to terminate and collect the status as they do.

The following seems to do what I want: 

my $pid1Complete = 0;
my $pid2Complete = 0;
my $pid3Complete = 0;
my $pid1 = system(1,"cmd...");
my $pid2 = system(1,"cmd...");
my $pid3 = system(1,"cmd...");

my $finishingPID = 0;
do {
    $finishingPID = wait();
    $rc = $?;
    if ($finishingPID == $pid1) 
    {
        $pid1Complete = 1;
        print "PID1 finished with return code $rc\n";
    }
    elsif ($finishingPID == $pid2)
    {
        $pid2Complete = 1;
        print "PID2 finished with return code $rc\n";
    }
    elsif ($finishingPID == $pid3)
    {
        $pid3Complete = 1;
        print "PID3 finished with return code $rc\n";
    }
} while (($pid1Complete == 0) || ($pid2Complete == 0) || ($pid3Complet
+e == 0));

[download]


If anybody has any suggestions for improvements or other ideas I'd be happy to hear them.

Thanks again.

In reply to Re^3: Getting a return code from waitpid in Windows by huskerben
in thread Getting a return code from waitpid in Windows by Anonymous Monk

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