Linux Signals

External

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_signal

Internal

• Linux General Concepts

Overview

Signals are numeric messages sent to running applications by the operating system, other applications, or the user. The signals are sent asynchronously, and allows the kernel to communicate asynchronously with processes. A signal is managed in a cascading manner. It's sent to the application or script, then if the application doesn't have a specific handler, it's pushed back to the shell or operating system. Some signals can't be managed within individual apps: for example SIGKILL is caught by the operating system and immediately kills the running application. For the rest of the signals, processes may or may not intercept the signals.

To send a specific signal to a process:

kill -<signal-value> <pid>

kill -2 3345

Signals

SIGHUP (1)

POSIX signal. Hangup.

Hangup is the signal that is sent to the process when the terminal closes on a foreground process. The default action the process should respond with is "terminate".

Also see:

nohup

httpd Restart Now

SIGINT (2)

Sends the process an interrupt. Guaranteed to be present on all systems. The default action a process should respond with is "terminate".

bash sends SIGINT to the process running in foreground when Ctrl-C is pressed.

SIGQUIT (3)

Will trigger a Java virtual machine to generate a thread dump.

SIGILL (4)

The SIGILL signal is sent to a process when it attempts to execute an illegal, malformed, unknown, or privileged instruction.

SIGKILL (9)

POSIX. Kill the process. The signal cannot be caught or ignored. Guaranteed to be present on all systems.

SIGUSR1 (10)

Also see:

httpd Graceful Restart

SIGTERM (15)

Also see:

httpd Stop Now

SIGCONT (18)

POSIX. Continue executing, if stopped. This is the signal send to a stopped application by the fg command.

Also see:

Suspending JVM Execution

SIGSTOP (19)

POSIX. Stop executing. The signal cannot be caught or ignored.

Also see:

Suspending JVM Execution

SIGTSTP (20)

Suspends a process executing in foreground. bash sends SIGTSTP to the process running in foreground when Ctrl-Z is pressed.

SIGWINCH (28)

Also see:

httpd Graceful Stop

Signals in Go

Signals in Go

Signals and bash

Handling Signals in bash