NAME

pause — stop until signal

LIBRARY

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

#include <unistd.h>

int
pause(void);

DESCRIPTION

Pause is made obsolete by sigsuspend(2).

The pause() function forces a process to pause until a signal is received from either the kill(2) function or an interval timer. (See setitimer(2).) Upon termination of a signal handler started during a pause(), the pause() call will return.

RETURN VALUES

Always returns -1.

ERRORS

The pause() function always returns:

[EINTR]

The call was interrupted.

SEE ALSO

kill(2), select(2), sigsuspend(2)

HISTORY

A pause() system call first appeared in the Programmer's Workbench (PWB/UNIX) and was then ported to Version 7 AT&T UNIX. It was reimplemented as a wrapper around the sigpause() and sigblock() system calls in 4.2BSD, and around the sigsuspend(2) and sigprocmask(2) system calls in 4.3BSD-Reno.