How to pause process linux

Does this work after restarting my system?

You might wonder, will this also work after a full system shutdown or reboot? NO. Because, the PIDs of the processes will automatically change after rebooting your system. They do not persist across reboot. In such cases, you can suspend or hibernate your entire system, and resume them when you are ready.

And, that’s all. You know now how to pause and resume a process in Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Hope this helps.

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How-to Pause a Linux Process

Linux is much better at multitasking processor-intensive tasks than Windows. I remember how virus scanning used to make by old Windows PC almost unusable. Linux is much better, but occasionally you may need to pause a process that is slowing things down.

Open a terminal. Run ps or ps aux to find the PID of the process you want to stop. If you want a program to try this out with, open xeyes with xeyes& on the terminal. (The ‘&’ symbol launches the program in the background.) This will create a window with eyes that follow your cursor around, you will be able to tell that it is paused when the eyes stop moving.

Now run kill -STOP 7727 but replace the number with your own xeyes PID. The eyes will stop moving when they are paused.

To continue execution of xeyes, run kill -CONT 7727 , again with your own PID. The eyes will start moving again.

When you are done you can end xeyes with kill 7727 (using your own PID).

Now you can pause and resume any application you like. Thanks to A Linux SysAd Blog for explaining this.

Archived Comments

ney frota

for the gui people (like my mother 🙂

— hit alt-f2 to pop-up run dialog
— type xeyes and hit enter
— go to: system -> administration -> system monitor
— on system monitor go to: process tab -> search for xeyes in the list
— right click xeyes and choose stop to pause the process
— right click xeyes and choose continue to release the process
— right click xeyes and choose kill to kill xeyes

terminal comands are veeeery usefull… because.. if you get a program stuck the system, the full gui gets tooooo sloooowww… so, you can hit control-alt-f1 to get a prompt, login, check process (top command can help you), kill/stop/whatever its eating you process power and hit control-alt-f7 to get back to gui

ivant

Here are some other useful commands, which can help in such tasks:

killall -STOP xeyes
will stop all processes named xeyes

pgrep -l eye
finds the PIDS of all processes, which contain ‘eye’
pkill -STOP eye
stops all the processes, containing ‘eye’

Actually, pgrep and pkill work with regular expressions.

top and htop — text based “gui” process monitors, which can sort processes based on memory consumption, cpu usage, etc. They can also send signals. I especially recommend htop. It’s very, very good!

VeRTiTO

i love this post! appreciate being mentioned, keep up the linux chills!

What about these more useful commands:
killall -s STOP xeyes
killall -s CONT xeyes

haha searched for this and noticed that it DIDN’T work for the process I wanted to pause: cp (copy)

there will be more processes you can’t pause I think

Keilaron

Another way to get the pid of xeyes without using killall or a “contains”-type search is to use pidof, e.g.:
kill `pidof xeyes`
You can use -s to force only one pid to be returned, e.g.:
kill `pidof -s xeyes`

Anonymous

thanks yar its working

milind

but how can we stop other processes … like copy for example

Anonymous

ctl-z to suspend

Bulat

then to turn this process from suspended state run fg interminal. So we have ‘ctrl-z’ to suspend, fg in terminal to resume

roger ward choirist

If you want to stop copy you can use “ctrl+c” (interrupt it), or kill

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Bash add pause prompt in a shell script ( bash pause command )

M ost of you may be aware of old good DOS/2000/XP pause command. It is used to display the prompt while suspending the processing of a batch script. It is used within a computer batch file and allows the computer to pause the currently running batch file until the user presses any key. Let us see how to pause our bash based shell script for a given number of times in seconds/minutes/hours before continuing to next operation/command running on a Linux or Unix-like systems.

bash pause command under Linux / UNIX / macOS

There is no pause command under Linux/UNIX bash shell. You can easily use the read command with the -p option to display pause along with a message.

Bash add pause prompt in a shell script with bash pause command

The above will suspends processing of a shell script and displays a message prompting the user to press [Enter] (or any) key to continue. The last example will wait for 5 seconds before next command execute. We can pass the -t option to the read command to set time out value. By passing the -s we can ask the read command not to echo input coming from a terminal/keyboard as follows:

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bash shell pause function

You can create a function as follows:

Getting help about the read command

Linux sleep command to pause a bash script

We can also use the sleep command to pause the execution of the next command or task for a given number of seconds. The syntax is as follows:
sleep NUM
sleep NUM[suffix]
By default it will pause for NUMBER seconds but we can add [suffix] as follows:

• s for seconds (the default)
• m for minutes
• h for hours
• d for days

Unlike most implementations of sleep on Unix-like system that require NUMBER be an integer, GNU/pause command NUMBER may be an arbitrary floating point number. Given two or more arguments, pause for the amount of time specified by the sum of their values.

How to use the sleep command

To sleep for 3 seconds, enter:
sleep 3
One can sleep for 0.8 seconds:
sleep 0.8
In this final example, sleep for 1 minute and 42 seconds:
sleep 1m 42s
Bash add pause prompt using the sleep command:

Please note that portable POSIX shell scripts must give sleep a single non-negative integer argument without a suffix. In other words the following is only valid:
sleep 10

Conclusion

Original DOS/XP pause command is an internal command. Use the above technique if you are migrating from DOS/Windows batch file scripting. Both the read command/sleep command used to pause the execution of the next action in script for a given amount of time. See GNU/sleep command man page here or by typing the following man command:
man sleep

Comments on this entry are closed.

What about SLEEP command?

Sleep puts a delay for a specified amount of time w/o a prompt. So you need to use read -p so that user can hit a key.

One small tip,
If you do this in a while loop that reads from a file.
e.g.
while read line
do
…..
read -p somevar
…..
done Gilles Allard Mar 5, 2007 @ 21:11

If you need an exact replacement for PAUSE you need to use:
read -n 1 -p prompt
without -n, read will require the ENTER key.
I’m not sure but -n may be a bash specific.

read -p “Press any key”. doesn’t provide the ‘pause’ behavior.

It requires ‘ENTER’ key to be pressed, so it becomes, ‘press ENTER key’ instead of ‘press any key’.

Thank you. I learned that the not so hard way. Trying it. 🙂

Using simply read to pause>nul can be quite useful too.

I ran into the need for pause in this simple bash script, where I pass a website as argument and the script tells me the password to the site from my personal password file. Note: one site and one password on each line, file mode should be 600.
The script is useful to have on my webserver which is always on and I can reach from work or anywhere whenever I need it.

/my_passwords.txt | grep $1; read; clear;

Hope this helps someone 🙂

Also gives me
4: read: arg count

(I needed to put in a “are you sure” message for windows users to be able to run scripts on a Linux box… who knows if it will help, but hey, at least it’s a start.)

Cool to know that that works out aswell!!

I believe the following is at least very close to the behavior of the pause command.

function pause() <
read -s -n 1 -p «Press any key to continue . . .»
echo
>

read is a good choice for pausing but, sometimes we are looking for — pause then continue command without user interference so i guess sleep is more realiable

Being a windows admin this was of great help.

• -n1 -> number of character it can read
• -t5 -> it will wait for 5 seconds the user to enter a char after 5 sec it will resume the flow

Hi,
I have one unix script file that has one command to execute a java program. That Java program is used to download a file from a server. After this command I have different commands (“hdiutil checksum -type CRC32 “) to execute on the downloaded file. My problem is that after executing the java command it is not waiting for the file to be downloaded from the server and executing that command and fails because still that file is not downloaded.

Can someone help me to resolve this issue. How should I wait fro the file to be downloaded then only it should execute the other commands?

Please help me to get out in to this situation as soon as possible…

for anyone writing any cli based php scripts, and who doesnt feel like installing the whole ncurses package JUST to get the ‘press enter to continue…’ functionality…

this method works great via

Thanks for script, I put it at the end of a function and it is helpful. How would I call a function when Enter is pressed? I tried the following but it didn’t work:

I want to write a program which pause execution when i enter “return key ” and start execution when i again enter “return key ” from where it is paused.
Please help me.

Thanks worked perfectly. Wonder why they don’t have this as a bash command…

The code worked except the comment should read “Press the ENTER key to continue…”.
Thank you!

This code worked for me well!

I am looking to pause the script multiple times. So, I used multiple pause statements after every 10 lines. It didn’t work.

Does anyone know why?

It’s not working for me. I’m not sure why. The loop just keeps going.

There is a way to cleanly do that on Linux:

Perfect, that’s exactly what I needed and the only approach that worked for me. Notice, that also this should read “Press …” instead of “any key”.

Sorry, previous one don’t properly works.
This do the job:

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