ACE Programmer's Guide, The: Practical Design Patterns for Network and Systems Programming

Chapter 11. Signals

Signals act as software interrupts and indicate to the application such asynchronous events as a user pressing the interrupt key on a terminal, a broken pipe between processes, job control functions, and so on. To handle signals, a program can associate a signal handler with a particular signal type. For example, for the interrupt key signal, you can set up a handler that instead of terminating the process, first asks whether the user wishes to terminate. In most cases, your application will want to handle most error signals so that you can either gracefully terminate or retry the current task.

Once the signal is raised, the associated signal handler is invoked in signal context, which is separate the interrupted main execution ...