Hour 19. Signals
Signals are software interrupts sent to a program indicating that an important event has occurred. The events can vary from user requests to illegal memory access errors. Some signals, such as the interrupt signal, indicate that a user has asked the program to do something that is not in the usual flow of control.
Because signals can arrive at any time during the execution of a script, they add an extra level of complexity to shell scripts. Scripts must account for this and include extra code that can determine the appropriate response to a signal, regardless of what the script was doing when the signal was received.
This chapter looks at the following signal-related topics:
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