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IPC Signals

Signals are generally used in UNIX-like systems for performing IPC actions.

C Standard Signals

  • SIGABRT (Abort)
  • SIGFPE (Floating point exception)
  • SIGILL (Illegal instruction)
  • SIGINT (Interrupt)
  • SIGSEGV (Segmentation violation, due to invalid memory access)
  • SIGTERM (Terminate a program)

UNIX POSIX/SUS Standard Signals

Note
  • Different signals are defined for software to use them in the way they want, but if they don't make use of them, they fall back to the default action
  • Signal numbers are usually left to implementations, but POSIX standard defines numbers for a few signals
Signal Signal Number Default Action Description
SIGABRT 6 Terminate (core dump) Process abort signal
SIGALRM 14 Terminate Alarm clock
SIGBUS Terminate (core dump) Access to an undefined portion of a memory object
SIGCHLD Ignore Child process terminated, stopped, or continued
SIGCONT Continue Continue executing, if stopped
SIGFPE 8 Terminate (core dump) Erroneous arithmetic operation
SIGHUP 1 Terminate Hangup
SIGILL 4 Terminate (core dump) Illegal instruction
SIGINT 2 Terminate Terminal interrupt signal
SIGKILL 9 Terminate Kill (cannot be caught or ignored)
SIGPIPE 13 Terminate Write on a pipe with no one to read it
SIGPOLL Terminate Pollable event
SIGPROF Terminate Profiling timer expired
SIGQUIT 3 Terminate (core dump) Terminal quit signal
SIGSEGV 11 Terminate (core dump) Invalid memory reference
SIGSTOP Stop Stop executing (cannot be caught or ignored)
SIGSYS Terminate (core dump) Bad system call
SIGTERM 15 Terminate Termination signal
SIGTRAP 5 Terminate (core dump) Trace/breakpoint trap
SIGTSTP Stop Terminal stop signal
SIGTTIN Stop Background process attempting read
SIGTTOU Stop Background process attempting write
SIGUSR1 Terminate User-defined signal 1
SIGUSR2 Terminate User-defined signal 2
SIGURG Ignore Out-of-band data is available at a socket
SIGVTALRM Terminate Virtual timer expired
SIGXCPU Terminate (core dump) CPU time limit exceeded
SIGXFSZ Terminate (core dump) File size limit exceeded
SIGWINCH Ignore Terminal window size changed
# Miscellaneous Signals
These signals aren't defined by POSIX, but are used in some systems.
  • SIGEMT
  • SIGINFO
  • SIGPWR
  • SIGLOST
  • SIGSTKFLT
  • SIGUNUSED
  • SIGCLD
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