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SIGPAUSE(3)                   Linux Programmer's Manual                   SIGPAUSE(3)

NAME         top

       sigpause - atomically release blocked signals and wait for interrupt

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <signal.h>

       int sigpause(int sigmask);  /* BSD */

       int sigpause(int sig);      /* System V / UNIX 95 */

DESCRIPTION         top

       Don't use this function.  Use sigsuspend(2) instead.

       The function sigpause() is designed to wait for some signal.  It changes the
       process's signal mask (set of blocked signals), and then waits for a signal to
       arrive.  Upon arrival of a signal, the original signal mask is restored.

RETURN VALUE         top

       If sigpause() returns, it was interrupted by a signal and the return value is
       -1 with errno set to EINTR.

CONFORMING TO         top

       The System V version of sigpause() is standardized in POSIX.1-2001.

NOTES         top

History

       The classical BSD version of this function appeared in 4.2BSD.  It sets the
       process's signal mask to sigmask.  UNIX 95 standardized the incompatible
       System V version of this function, which removes only the specified signal sig
       from the process's signal mask.  The unfortunate situation with two
       incompatible functions with the same name was solved by the sigsuspend(2)
       function, that takes a sigset_t * argument (instead of an int).

Linux Notes

       On Linux, this routine is a system call only on the Sparc (sparc64)
       architecture.

       Libc4 and libc5 only know about the BSD version.

       Glibc uses the BSD version if the _BSD_SOURCE feature test macro is defined
       and none of _POSIX_SOURCE, _POSIX_C_SOURCE, _XOPEN_SOURCE, _GNU_SOURCE, or
       _SVID_SOURCE is defined.  Otherwise, the System V version is used.

SEE ALSO         top

       kill(2), sigaction(2), sigprocmask(2), sigsuspend(2), sigblock(3), sigvec(3),
       feature_test_macros(7)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project.  A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
       at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

Linux                                 2010-09-12                          SIGPAUSE(3)

HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface

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