Signals
Signals are used for communication between processes. If you start a new process, how can you communicate with it through your shell or any other program or process while it is running? Also, how does the parent process know when the child process is finishing? For example, how does your Bash know when the ls -al command is terminating? In Linux, this kind of notification and interprocess communication is done using signals. In Linux, if a process starts another process, the parent process is put to sleep until the child process command has finished, which will trigger a special signal and this will wake up the parent process. The parent process is put to sleep so that no active CPU time is needed for waiting. A popular signal is ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access