debian man page for sigpause

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

NAME
       sigpause - atomically release blocked signals and wait for interrupt

SYNOPSIS
       #include <signal.h>

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

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

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

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

NOTES
   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 unfortu-
       nate situation with two incompatible functions with the same name was solved by the sigsuspend(2) function, that takes a sigset_t  *  argu-
       ment (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
       kill(2), sigaction(2), sigprocmask(2), sigsuspend(2), sigblock(3), sigvec(3), feature_test_macros(7)

COLOPHON
       This page is part of release 3.44 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)