9.8. Trapping Signals

While your program is running, if you press Control-C or Control-\, your program terminates as soon as the signal arrives. There are times when you would rather not have the program terminate immediately after the signal arrives. You could arrange to ignore the signal and keep running or perform some sort of cleanup operation before actually exiting the script. The trap command allows you to control the way a program behaves when it receives a signal.

A signal is defined as an asynchronous message that consists of a number that can be sent from one process to another, or by the operating system to a process if certain keys are pressed or if something exceptional happens.[6]The trap command tells the shell to terminate the ...

Get Linux Shells by Example now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.