pause(2)

✨ pause(2) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to pause(2) from the System Calls Manual — literally the chillest syscall in the whole libc friend group 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

pause — wait for signal 🦋

📚 LIBRARY 📚

Standard C library (libc, -lc) 🎀

🪄 SYNOPSIS 🪄

#include <unistd.h>

int pause(void);

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so the way that pause() works is iconic in its simplicity: it makes the calling process (or thread — yes, threads count too, periodt) go full sleepy-girl mode 😴 and just... sleep. It stays asleep until a signal shows up that either:

• terminates the process, or
• causes the invocation of a signal-catching function 🔥

that's it. that's the whole vibe. no cap.

🫶 RETURN VALUE 🫶

okay so here's the thing — pause() lowkey never returns normally. It only comes back when a signal was caught and the signal-catching function returned. In that case:

• pause() returns -1 😭
• and errno is set to EINTR

so it's giving "I woke up and I'm a little confused about it" energy fr fr.

💀 ERRORS 💀

• EINTR — a signal was caught and the signal-catching function returned. that's the one and only babe, no other options, no cap (the docs literally list just this one, so don't go looking for more 🙈).

👑 STANDARDS 👑

POSIX.1-2024. she's certified, she's compliant, she ate ✨

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

POSIX.1-2001, SVr4, 4.3BSD — so she's been around since forever, a true vintage queen 👑

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• kill(2)
• select(2)
• signal(2)
• sigsuspend(2)

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reminder bestie: if you're out here calling pause() and expecting it to return 0, that's not happening. It returns -1 with errno == EINTR or it doesn't return at all. Set your errno expectations accordingly 💜

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kisses, this was pause(2) from Linux man-pages 6.20, dated 2026-02-08 🎀 bye bestie, go read sigsuspend(2) next, it's the extroverted version of this one 🎀