What is the bash equivalent of DOS's pause command?

I need a pause on a shell script to show a warning before continuing. For instance, on DOS it goes like this:

doit.bat:

[...]
echo 'Are you sure? Press Ctrl-C to abort, enter to continue.'
pause
[...]

How can I do this on bash? For the moment a sleep command seems to do the trick and is simple enough but is not exactly the idea:

doit.sh

[...]
echo 'Are you sure? Press Ctrl-C to abort.'
sleep 3
[...]

something along the lines of

echo -n "prompt"  #'-n' means do not add \n to end of string
read              # No arg means dump next line of input

read -p "Press any key to continue or CTRL-C to abort" works fine under 14.04 in my scripts. As @Lekensteyn stated in the comment above it seems this has been the case since 12.04.4. The 'help read' page states:

-p prompt   output the string PROMPT without a trailing newline before
            attempting to read

The simples wait to stop the script is to call kill -STOP $$ from the script: After paused the script will continue its work after receiving -CONT signal.

#!/bin/bash
echo "$0 stopping now"
kill -STOP $$
echo "$0 continues its work"