1--- 2title: "pause" 3description: "The pause command description and usage" 4keywords: "cgroups, container, suspend, SIGSTOP" 5--- 6 7<!-- This file is maintained within the docker/cli GitHub 8 repository at https://github.com/docker/cli/. Make all 9 pull requests against that repo. If you see this file in 10 another repository, consider it read-only there, as it will 11 periodically be overwritten by the definitive file. Pull 12 requests which include edits to this file in other repositories 13 will be rejected. 14--> 15 16# pause 17 18```markdown 19Usage: docker pause CONTAINER [CONTAINER...] 20 21Pause all processes within one or more containers 22 23Options: 24 --help Print usage 25``` 26 27## Description 28 29The `docker pause` command suspends all processes in the specified containers. 30On Linux, this uses the cgroups freezer. Traditionally, when suspending a process 31the `SIGSTOP` signal is used, which is observable by the process being suspended. 32With the cgroups freezer the process is unaware, and unable to capture, 33that it is being suspended, and subsequently resumed. On Windows, only Hyper-V 34containers can be paused. 35 36See the 37[cgroups freezer documentation](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/freezer-subsystem.txt) 38for further details. 39 40## Examples 41 42```bash 43$ docker pause my_container 44``` 45 46## Related commands 47 48* [unpause](unpause.md) 49