Author : LUPG
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Table Of Contents
What Are Signals?
Sending Signals To Processes
Catching Signals - Signal Handlers
Installing Signal Handlers
Avoiding Signal Races - Masking Signals
Implementing Timers Using Signals
Summary - "Do" and "Don't" inside A Signal Handler
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).
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.
Note for "hardwarists": If you are familiar with interrupts (you are, right?), signals are very similar in their behavior. The difference is that while interrupts are sent to the operating system by the hardware, signals are sent to the process by the operating system, or by other processes. Note that signals have nothing to do with software interrupts, which are still sent by the hardware (the CPU itself, in this case).
Sending Signals To Processes
Sending Signals Using The Keyboard
The most common way of sending signals to processes is using the keyboard. There are certain key presses that are interpreted by the system as requests to send signals to the process with which we are interacting:
Ctrl-C
Pressing this key causes the system to send an INT signal (SIGINT) to the running process. By default, this signal causes the process to immediately terminate.
Ctrl-Z
Pressing this key causes the system to send a TSTP signal (SIGTSTP) to the running process. By default, this signal causes the process to suspend execution.
Ctrl-\
Pressing this key causes the system to send a ABRT signal (SIGABRT) to the running process. By default, this signal causes the process to immediately terminate. Note that this redundancy (i.e. Ctrl-\ doing the same as Ctrl-C) gives us some better flexibility. We'll explain that later on.
Sending Signals From The Command Line
Another way of sending signals to processes is done using various commands, usually internal to the shell:
kill
The kill command accepts two parameters: a signal name (or number), and a process ID. Usually the syntax for using it goes something like:
kill -<signal> <PID>
For example, in order to send the INT signal to process with PID 5342, type:
kill -INT 5342
This has the same affect as pressing Ctrl-C in the shell that runs that process.
If no signal name or number is specified, the default is to send a TERM signal to the process, which normally causes its termination, and hence the name of the kill command.
fg
On most shells, using the 'fg' command will resume execution of the process (that was suspended with Ctrl-Z), by sending it a CONT signal.
Sending Signals Using System Calls
A third way of sending signals to processes is by using the kill system call. This is the normal way of sending a signal from one process to another. This system call is also used by the 'kill' command or by the 'fg' command. Here is an example code that causes a process to suspend its own execution by sending itself the STOP signal:
#include <unistd.h> /* standard unix functions, like getpid() */
#include <sys/types.h> /* various type definitions, like pid_t */
#include <signal.h> /* signal name macros, and the kill() prototype */
/* first, find my own process ID */
pid_t my_pid = getpid();
/* now that i got my PID, send myself the STOP signal. */
kill(my_pid, SIGSTOP);
An example of a situation when this code might prove useful, is inside a signal handler that catches the TSTP signal (Ctrl-Z, remember?) in order to do various tasks before actually suspending the process. We will see an example of this later on.
Catching Signals - Signal Handlers
Catchable And Non-Catchable Signals
Most signals may be caught by the process, but there are a few signals that the process cannot catch, and cause the process to terminate. For example, the KILL signal (-9 on all unices I've met so far) is such a signal. This is why you usually see a process being shut down using this signal if it gets "wild". One process that uses this signal is a system shutdown process. It first sends a TERM signal to all processes, waits a while, and after allowing them a "grace period" to shut down cleanly, it kills whichever are left using the KILL signal.
STOP is also a signal that a process cannot catch, and forces the process's suspension immediately. This is useful when debugging programs whose behavior depends on timing. Suppose that process A needs to send some data to process B, and you want to check some system parameters after the message is sent, but before it is received and processed by process B. One way to do that would be to send a STOP signal to process B, thus causing its suspension, and then running process A and waiting until it sends its oh-so important message to process B. Now you can check whatever you want to, and later on you can use the CONT signal to continue process B's execution, which will then receive and process the message sent from process A.
Now, many other signals are catchable, and this includes the famous SEGV and BUS signals. You probably have seen numerous occasions when a program has exited with a message such as 'Segmentation Violation - Core Dumped', or 'Bus Error - core dumped'. In the first occasion, a SEGV signal was sent to your program due to accessing an illegal memory address. In the second case, a BUS signal was sent to your program, due to accessing a memory address with invalid alignment. In both cases, it is possible to catch these signals in order to do some cleanup - kill child processes, perhaps remove temporary files, etc. Although in both cases, the memory used by your process is most likely corrupt, it's probable that only a small part of it was corrupt, so cleanup is still usually possible.
Default Signal Handlers
If you install no signal handlers of your own (remember what a signal handler is? yes, that function handling a signal?), the runtime environment sets up a set of default signal handlers for your program. For example, the default signal handler for the TERM signal calls the exit() system call. The default handler for the ABRT signal calls the abort() system call, which causes the process's memory image to be dumped into a file named 'core' in the process's current directory, and then exit.
Installing Signal Handlers
There are several ways to install signal handlers. We'll use the most basic form here, and refer you to your manual pages for further reading.
The signal() System Call
The signal() system call is used to set a signal handler for a single signal type. signal() accepts a signal number and a pointer to a signal handler function, and sets that handler to accept the given signal. As an example, here is a code snippest that causes the program to print the string "Don't do that" when a user presses Ctrl-C:
#include <stdio.h> /* standard I/O functions */
#include <unistd.h> /* standard unix functions, like getpid() */
#include <sys/types.h> /* various type definitions, like pid_t */
#include <signal.h> /* signal name macros, and the signal() prototype */
/* first, here is the signal handler */
void catch_int(int sig_num)
{
/* re-set the signal handler again to catch_int, for next time */
signal(SIGINT, catch_int);
/* and print the message */
printf("Don't do that");
fflush(stdout);
}
.
.
.
/* and somewhere later in the code.... */
.
.
/* set the INT (Ctrl-C)
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