1.6. Signals
UNIX systems have provided a process signaling mechanism from the earliest implementations. The signal facility provides a means to interrupt a process or thread within a process as a result of a specific event. The events that trigger signals can be directly related to the current instruction stream. Such signals, referred to as synchronous signals, originate as hardware trap conditions arising from illegal address references (segmentation violation), illegal math operations (floating point exceptions), and the like.
The system also implements asynchronous signals, which result from an external event not necessarily related to the current instruction stream. Examples of asynchronous signals include job control signals and the sending ...
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