System(pause) in Unix?

I normally use a debugger such as cgdb so I thankfully hadn't needed to resort to system calls for debugging, until now.

I have a binary that takes around 30 minutes to load in gdb and frequently crashes the debugger thereafter, probably due to the very large number of symbols. This makes my normal workflow (loading gdb, adding breakpoints, identifying problem variables, etc.) untenable.

In windows I would at this point begin adding lots of cout and system("pause") (poor man's breakpoint) statements throughout my code; but how do I do this in a unix-like environment?