Signal Handling (signal.h)

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Signal handling (signal.h)

A signal is an event that interrupts the normal flow of control in your program. Your operating environment normally defines the full set of signals available (see sys/signal.h), as well as the default means of dealing with them—typically, either printing an error message and aborting your program, or ignoring the signal. All systems support at least the following signals.

SIGABRT | Abnormal termination of a program; raised by the abort function.
SIGFPE | A domain error in arithmetic, such as overflow, or division by zero.
SIGILL | Attempt to execute as unexecutable function data.
SIGINT | Interrupt; an interactive attention signal.
SIGSEGV | An attempt to access an unavailable memory location.
SIGTERM | A request that your program end execution.

Two functions are available for dealing with asynchronous signals—one to allow your program to send signals to itself (this is called raising a signal), and one to specify subroutines (called handlers to handle particular signals that you anticipate may occur—whether raised by your own program or the operating environment).

See raise and signal for discussion of each of these two functions.

To support these functions, signal.h defines the following three macros.

SIG_DFL | Used with the signal function in place of a pointer to a handler subroutine, to select the operating environment’s default handling of a signal.
SIG_IGN | Used with the signal function in place of a pointer to a handler, to ignore a particular signal.
SIG_ERR | Returned by the signal function in place of a pointer to a handler, to indicate that your request to set up a handler could not be honored for some reason.

signal.h also defines an integral type, sig_atomic_t. This type is not used in any function declarations; it exists only to allow your signal handlers to declare a static storage location where they may store a signal value. (Static storage is not otherwise reliable from signal handlers.)

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