Why does cygwin pause awaiting keyboard input?

Question

When using to cygwin to run commands, often the command will just hang periodically unless I press a key.

For example, when running an svn checkout, I start the checkout, come back from lunch, and nothing has happened. Pressing a key causes the command to continue ?

Answer 1

I see something like this, but in my experience it's more due to the DOS Window than to Cygwin. Do you use the default window? You may want to try to move to mintty or rxvt.