I was unable to get pcntl_wait or pcntl_waitpid to terminate when I had an active signal handler. I then noticed the post below from gaylord at 100days dot de, however I'm a little confused by that post as I found the exact opposite to be true. The default value of the third parameter of pcntl_signal (the restart_syscalls parameter) is true and this seems to cause the wait to continue when the signal arrives. In order to prevent this I had to expressly set it to false. That is:
pcntl_signal(SIGTERM, 'my_handler_function', false);
