For capital punishment by suspension from and breaking of the neck, see hanging.

To hang (out) means to socialize with one or more people, usually close friends.

In Computing, either a single computer program or the whole system may hang. This means that either just this process or the whole system is unresponsive to Computer keyboard and computer mouse Input/output. The window concerned or the whole computer screen becomes static, in the latter case including the mouse cursor. Contrast with crash, where a program exits abnormally with an error message.

When no other input works one has to resort to the off button, or sometimes a reset button.

The cause of a hang is usually that the programmer has incorrect termination conditions for a program loop, or, in a co-operative multitasking operating system, forgetting to yield to other tasks. But unstable electricity is an underestimated cause for hangs. More hangs than most people realize are due to interferences in the electricity.

Usually, in systems with a modern operating system, the user is able to terminate the program s running (for instance, with the Kill (Unix) command, or through the end task button on the task list in recent versions of Microsoft Windows), and, if they wish, restart it in the hope that the anomalous condition that caused the hang does not recur. Older systems, such as those using MS-DOS or Microsoft Windows 3.1, often needed to be cold boot in the event of a hang.

Most newer systems, such as Apple Computer s Mac OS X and Microsoft s Windows XP crash less often; they do not need to be totally restarted in the event of a hang.

A Watchdog timer can reboot the computer in events of a hang.

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