Introduction To Unix Signals Programming
What Are Signals?
Signals, to be short, are various notifications sent to a process in order to notify it of various "important" events. By their nature, they interrupt whatever the process is doing at this minute, and force it to handle them immediately. Each signal has an integer number that represents it (1, 2 and so on), as well as a symbolic name that is usually defined in the file /usr/include/signal.h or one of the files included by it directly or indirectly (HUP, INT and so on. Use the command 'kill -l' to see a list of signals supported by your system).
Signals, to be short, are various notifications sent to a process in order to notify it of various "important" events. By their nature, they interrupt whatever the process is doing at this minute, and force it to handle them immediately. Each signal has an integer number that represents it (1, 2 and so on), as well as a symbolic name that is usually defined in the file /usr/include/signal.h or one of the files included by it directly or indirectly (HUP, INT and so on. Use the command 'kill -l' to see a list of signals supported by your system).
Each signal may have a signal handler, which is a function that gets called when the process receives that signal. The function is called in "asynchronous mode", meaning that no where in your program you have code that calls this function directly. Instead, when the signal is sent to the process, the operating system stops the execution of the process, and "forces" it to call the signal handler function. When that signal handler function returns, the process continues execution from wherever it happened to be before the signal was received, as if this interruption never occurred......
