Pause

The pause command displays any text associated with the command and then waits a specified amount of time or until the carriage return is pressed. pause is especially useful in conjunction with load files.

Syntax:

     pause <time> {"<string>"}
     pause mouse {"<string>"}

5#5time6#6 may be any constant or expression. Choosing -1 will wait until a carriage return is hit, zero (0) won't pause at all, and a positive number will wait the specified number of seconds. The time is rounded to an integer number of seconds if subsecond time resolution is not supported by the given platform. pause 0 is synonymous with print.

If the current terminal supports mousing, then pause mouse will terminate on either a mouse click or on ctrl-C. For all other terminals, or if mousing is not active, pause mouse is equivalent to pause -1.

Note: Since pause communicates with the operating system rather than the graphics, it may behave differently with different device drivers (depending upon how text and graphics are mixed).

Examples:

     pause -1    # Wait until a carriage return is hit
     pause 3     # Wait three seconds
     pause -1  "Hit return to continue"
     pause 10  "Isn't this pretty?  It's a cubic spline."
     pause mouse "Click mouse on selected data point"