Understanding Signals with Processes

[ Thanks to Andrew Weber for this link. ]

"Signals are asynchronous events that can occur to a running process and may be caused by hardware, software or users. Signals are numeric integer messages that have been predefined so they understand what these signals mean. When a process receives a signal, that process must respond to the signal. Uncaught signals will cause default actions to take place, which often means the process is terminated. If you use "kill -l", or "trap -l" you can get a list of available signals.

kill -l
1) SIGHUP     2) SIGINT     3) SIGQUIT     4) SIGILL
5) SIGTRAP     6) SIGABRT     7) SIGBUS     8) SIGFPE
9) SIGKILL    10) SIGUSR1    11) SIGSEGV    12) SIGUSR2

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Deep System Discovery on your Linux Server With /proc(Dec 10, 2010)
• Linux Command Sequences in the Bash Shell(Dec 10, 2010)
• How to find which process is eating RAM memory in Linux(Dec 09, 2010)
• How to Handle files with a strange name in linux shell(Dec 06, 2010)
• 6 More of the Best Free Linux Monitoring Tools(Nov 27, 2010)
• The kernel column #94 by Jon Masters(Nov 22, 2010)
• systemd Status Update(Nov 19, 2010)