pause(2) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

 pause(2) System Calls Manual pause(2) 

NAME         top

 pause - wait for signal 

LIBRARY         top

 Standard C library (libc, -lc) 

SYNOPSIS         top

 #include <unistd.h> int pause(void); 

DESCRIPTION         top

 pause() causes the calling process (or thread) to sleep until a signal is delivered that either terminates the process or causes the invocation of a signal-catching function. 

RETURN VALUE         top

 pause() returns only when a signal was caught and the signal- catching function returned. In this case, pause() returns -1, and errno is set to EINTR. 

ERRORS         top

 EINTR a signal was caught and the signal-catching function returned. 

STANDARDS         top

 POSIX.1-2008. 

HISTORY         top

 POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD. 

SEE ALSO         top

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

COLOPHON         top

 This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library user-space interface documentation) project. Information about the project can be found at ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, see ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩. This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz fetched from ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on 2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up- to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.org Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 pause(2) 

Pages that refer to this page: pmsleep(1)alarm(2)ptrace(2)sigaction(2)signal(2)sigprocmask(2)sigsuspend(2)syscalls(2)wait(2)sigset(3)sigvec(3)signal(7)signal-safety(7)