I have noticed by browsing through truss files that when pclose is called after a popen, waitid is called.  I can understand why, since pclose returns the status of the process exec'ed off by popen.  This does become a burden, however when the exec'ed process takes some time to run.  For example, in many thinks I have been doing, I have been using popen to open a pipe to sendmail, and send out mail.  When pclose is then called, it takes anywhere from 5 to 6 seconds to fufill that function call.  This takes place for EACH pclose call, which can significantly slow down the loading of a web page.

I'd like to maybe suggest a second argument to pclose, which would be a boolean, as to whether or not the programmer wants the exit status of the exec'ed process, or pclose itself.  The default value could have pclose work the way it currently does.  This would allow those of us who run into this problem an easy speed workaround.