The best uses I’ve found for the SIGSTOP and SIGCONT signals are times when a process goes haywire, or when a script spawns too many processes at once. You can issue the signals like this: kill -SIGSTOP [pid] kill -SIGCONT [pid] Wikipedia has great definitions for SIGSTOP: When SIGSTOP is sent to a process, the usual behaviour is to pause that process in its current state. The process will only resume execution if it is sent the SIGCONT signal.