sigpause(2)

sigpause2

Atomically release blocked signals and wait for interrupt

Usage

#include <signal.h>

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

int sigpause(int sig);      /* Unix95 */

Overview

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

The function sigpause() is designed to wait for some signal. It changes the process' 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

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

Releases

9 releases since Debian 1.1 (Buzz); the text changed 5 times.

  1. 1.1–1.2
  2. 1.3–2.1
  3. 2.2
  4. 3.0
  5. 3.1
  6. 4.0

History

The classical BSD version of this function appeared in 4.2BSD. It sets the process' signal mask to sigmask. When the number of signals was increased above 32, this version was replaced by the incompatible Unix95 one, which removes only the specified signal sig from the process' 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 * parameter (instead of an int).

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 unless _XOPEN_SOURCE is defined.

From manpages-dev 2.39-1 in Debian 4.0 (Etch). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.