Available signals

The Unix/Linux OS provides a set of 64 signals in total. They are broadly divided into two types: the standard or Unix signals and the real-time signals. We shall find that while they do share common attributes, there are some important differences as well; here, we shall investigate the Unix (or standard) signals and later, the latter.

The generic communication interface for signalling from userspace, besides the keyboard key combinations (such as Ctrl + C), is the kill(1) utility (and, consequently, the kill(2) system call).

Besides the kill, there are several other APIs that deliver a signal; we shall flesh out more on this in a later section of this chapter.

Running the kill(1) utility with the -l or list option lists the available signals on the platform:

$ 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 13) SIGPIPE 14) SIGALRM 15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT 17) SIGCHLD 18) SIGCONT 19) SIGSTOP 20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN 22) SIGTTOU 23) SIGURG 24) SIGXCPU 25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM 27) SIGPROF 28) SIGWINCH 29) SIGIO 30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS 34) SIGRTMIN 35) SIGRTMIN+1 36) SIGRTMIN+2 37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4 39) SIGRTMIN+5 40) SIGRTMIN+6 41) SIGRTMIN+7 42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9 44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12
47) SIGRTMIN+13 48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14
51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12 53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10
55) SIGRTMAX-9 56) SIGRTMAX-8 57) SIGRTMAX-7 58) SIGRTMAX-6 59) SIGRTMAX-5 60) SIGRTMAX-4 61) SIGRTMAX-3 62) SIGRTMAX-2 63) SIGRTMAX-1 64) SIGRTMAX
$

Perhaps the moniker kill(1) is a misnomer: the kill utility just sends a signal to a given process (or job). Thus (per your author at least), the name sendsig might have been a better choice for the utility.

An FAQ: where are the signals numbered 32 and 33?
They are internally used by the Linux Pthreads implementation (called NPTL), and are hence unavailable to app developers.
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