sigsuspend(2)

sigsuspend2

Atomically release blocked signals and wait for interrupt

Usage

#include <signal.h>

int

sigsuspend(const sigset_t *sigmask);

Library

Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

Overview

The sigsuspend() system call temporarily changes the blocked signal mask to the set to which sigmask points, and then waits for a signal to arrive; on return the previous set of masked signals is restored. The signal mask set is usually empty to indicate that all signals are to be unblocked for the duration of the call.

In normal usage, a signal is blocked using sigprocmask(2) to begin a critical section, variables modified on the occurrence of the signal are examined to determine that there is no work to be done, and the process pauses awaiting work by using sigsuspend() with the previous mask returned by sigprocmask(2).

Return values

The sigsuspend() system call always terminates by being interrupted, returning -1 with errno set to EINTR.

Releases

87 releases since FreeBSD 2.0.5-RELEASE; the text changed 44 times.

  1. 2.0.5–2.1.7.1
  2. 2.2.2–2.2.9
  3. 3.0–3.4
  4. 3.5–3.5.1
  5. 4.0
  6. 4.1–4.2
  7. 4.3
  8. 4.4
  9. 4.5–4.11
  10. 5.0
  11. 5.1
  12. 5.2–6.3
  13. 6.4
  14. 7.0
  15. 7.1
  16. 7.2
  17. 7.3
  18. 7.4
  19. 8.0
  20. 8.1
  21. 8.2
  22. 8.3
  23. 8.4
  24. 9.0
  25. 9.1
  26. 9.2
  27. 9.3
  28. 10.0
  29. 10.1
  30. 10.2
  31. 10.3
  32. 10.4
  33. 11.0
  34. 11.1
  35. 11.2
  36. 11.3
  37. 11.4
  38. 12.0
  39. 12.1
  40. 12.2
  41. 12.3
  42. 12.4
  43. 13.0–13.2
  44. 13.3–14.5
  45. 15.0–16.0

Standards

The sigsuspend() system call is expected to conform to ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 (“POSIX.1”).

From base 16.0-CURRENT-20261027-61c70dc16a79 in FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT (2026-10-27). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.