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Command Line Interface

Signals in Linux

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    Linux Bash
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Introduction

Signals are used to interact between processes and can occur at anytime, typically they are kill signals however processes can opt to handle them programatically unless they are SIGKILL or SIGSTOP signals.

List Of Available Signals

Table of signals

SIGNAL VALUE DEFAULT ACTION POSIX? MEANING
SIGHUP 1 Terminate Yes Hangup detected on controlling terminal or death of controlling process
SIGINT 2 Terminate Yes Interrupt from keyboard
SIGQUIT 3 Core dump Yes Quit from keyboard
SIGILL 4 Core dump Yes Illegal instruction
SIGTRAP 5 Core dump No Trace/breakpoint trap for debugging
SIGABTR SIGIOT 6 Core dump Yes Abnormal termination
SIGBUS 7 Core dump Yes Bus error
SIGFPE 8 Core dump Yes Floating point exception
SIGKILL 9 Terminate Yes Kill signal (cannot be caught or ignored)
SIGUSR1 10 Terminate Yes User-defined signal 1
SIGSEGV 11 Core dump Yes Invalid memory reference
SIGUSR2 12 Terminate Yes User-defined signal 2
SIGPIPE 13 Terminate Yes Broken pipe: write to pipe with no readers
SIGALRM 14 Terminate Yes Timer signal from alarm
SIGTERM 15 Terminate Yes Process termination
SIGSTKFLT 16 Terminate No Stack fault on math co-processor
SIGCHLD 17 Ignore Yes Child stopped or terminated
SIGCONT 18 Continue Yes Continue if stopped
SIGSTOP 19 Stop Yes Stop process (can not be caught or ignored)
SIGTSTP 20 Stop Yes Stop types at tty
SIGTTIN 21 Stop Yes Background process requires tty input
SIGTTOU 22 Stop Yes Background process requires tty output
SIGURG 23 Ignore No Urgent condition on socket (4.2 BSD)
SIGXCPU 24 Core dump Yes CPU time limit exceeded (4.2 BSD)
SIGXFSZ 25 Core dump Yes File size limit exceeded (4.2 BSD)
SIGVTALRM 26 Terminate No Virtual alarm clock (4.2 BSD)
SIGPROF 27 Terminate No Profile alarm clock (4.2 BSD)
SIGWINCH 28 Ignore No Window resize signal (4.3 BSD, Sun)
SIGIO SIGPOLL 29 Terminate No I/O now possible (4.2 BSD) (System V)
SIGPWR 30 Terminate No Power Failure (System V)
SIGSYS SIGUNUSED 31 Terminate No Bad System Called. Unused signal