The pclose function closes a pipe between the calling program and a shell command to be executed. Use pclose to close any stream you have opened with popen. The pclose function waits for the associated process to end, and then returns the exit status of the command. See the description of waitpid for information on interpreting the exit status. Beginning with OpenVMS Version 7.3-1, when compiled with the _VMS_WAIT macro defined, the pclose function returns the OpenVMS completion code of the child process. See also popen.