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C Academy · Lesson

Signals

Asynchronous notifications.

What Is a Signal

A signal is an asynchronous notification sent to a process to tell it that an event occurred, such as a user pressing Ctrl-C or a child process exiting. Signals are a lightweight form of IPC.

Common Signals

A few you will meet often:

  • SIGINT interrupt (Ctrl-C)
  • SIGTERM polite termination request
  • SIGKILL forced kill (cannot be caught)
  • SIGCHLD a child changed state
  • SIGSEGV invalid memory access

All lessons in this course

  1. Pipes
  2. Shared Memory
  3. Message Queues
  4. Signals
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