an application pauser for all occasions

This application was inspired by this post on Reddit, which showcased an application that allows one to pause a game during unpausable cutscenes on Windows. OP's comments showed that the application had to pause the executing thread to pause a game, which led me to thinking about developing a similar application for Linux. It's indeed very simple to send STOP and CONT signals on Linux, which made it possible to create a launcher wrapper that listens on a socket for commands like pause, resume and kill.

Launch the desired application with

$ apppauser your-application [arguments]

and control it with

apppauserctl command

where command can be:

• pause: sends the SIGSTOP signal to an application
• resume: sends the SIGCONT signal to an application
• toggle: sends either SIGSTOP or SIGCONT signal to an application, depending on its current status
• kill: sends the SIGTERM signal to an application

Install the Go compiler, and then run go get github.com/ericonr/AppPauser to compile both binaries and store them in $GOBIN. You then only need to add $GOBIN to your $PATH and you are ready to use this!

There's still a lot to do. What I've already thought about:

• Make the default name for sockets be related to the user's username
• Include feedback on the output of apppauserctl, which for now doesn't listen to any responses
• Create command line options to determine the socket name and other options (such as starting an application already paused)

This is as incomplete as it comes, but it did work in my machine. Please let me know about any issues!