Question On signals in perl

kprasanna_79 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Question On signals in perl by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Aug 01, 2005 at 13:11 UTC
kprasanna_79, This is one of those questions where it really would take far too long to explain not knowing how much background you already have. In a nutshell, a signal is a way to communicate with a running process. You can tell it to terminate for instance. In most cases, the process can "catch" the signal and handle it appropriately. That's what the code you have found is doing. Read perlipc and then come back with more specific questions if that doesn't answer them. Cheers - L~R	[reply]
Re^2: Question On signals in perl by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Aug 01, 2005 at 14:49 UTC
a signal is a way to communicate with a running process Sort of, but it is the system, not the programmer that does the communicating and it's restricted to notification by a precise method and of a particular set of possible events. One world, one people	[reply]
Re^3: Question On signals in perl by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Aug 01, 2005 at 14:59 UTC
I tend to disagree that it is the system, not the programmer that does the communicating. I don't disagree that the system can initiate and deliver a signal without a user, but that certainly isn't the only way. While it is ultimately the system that delivers the signal, a user can most certainly invoke the signal. If I hit ctrl-C while running a program, I am intentionally sending it a signal. If I type kill -9 <pid> from the command line, I am sending it a signal. Perl even has kill which can deliver a signal at the programmer's whim (with all the caveats outlined in perlport). I don't disagree that it is a very limited form of communication, but I prefaced my comment with how hard it was to give a concise answer without knowing the background of the person asking the question. I went on to give a reference where more could be asked. I appreciate the comment but I don't believe it does any more to help someone understand signals without knowing how much they already know. Cheers - L~R	[reply]
Re^4: Question On signals in perl by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Aug 01, 2005 at 15:35 UTC
Re: Question On signals in perl by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Aug 01, 2005 at 13:31 UTC
$SIG{HUP} is the handler for the hangup signal which is sent to a process when it loses its controlling terminal. That happens, for instance, when a user logs out with a process running in background. A daemon process has no controlling terminal, so SIGHUP is available and is by custom used to tell the daemon to re-read its configuration files and re-initialize. $SIG{TERM} is the handler for the process termination signal. See `man 7 signal` for a list of signals and their default handlers. In most cases the system's default handler is sufficient and you don't need to write one of your own. It's best to not introduce unusual signal handling. After Compline, Zaxo	[reply]
Re: Question On signals in perl by blazar (Canon) on Aug 01, 2005 at 13:18 UTC
When i am going through some code in my project, i found something term called `$SIG{HUP}`,`$SIG{TERM}`. Can anybody give me some idea about these signals.. Well, here it's clear you have to do with a hash called `%SIG`. Check perldoc perlvar: `%SIG $SIG{expr} The hash %SIG contains signal handlers for signals. For exam- ple:` [download] and read the docs referenced therein, e.g. perldoc perlipc. and also what are the various signals that are present in perl. I am using perl version 5.00_03. Signals are not stuff "present in perl". They rather have to do with the OS, although (from the same source as above): `Certain internal hooks can be also set using the %SIG hash.` [download] In any case if you're really interested, you may benefit from reading a UNIX programming book, even if not a Perl one.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Question On signals in perl by samizdat (Vicar) on Aug 01, 2005 at 14:21 UTC
The classic: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by W. Richard Stevens Perl specific (all from O'Reilly): Learning Perl (v2) p. 150 Programming Perl (v2) p. 337 Perl Cookbook Section 16, p.551 on	[reply]
Re: Question On signals in perl by anonymized user 468275 (Curate) on Aug 01, 2005 at 13:37 UTC
A signal is notification to the process of a (nominally) asynchronous event. Examples are: INT - the process has been interrupted e.g. by ctrl/c HUP - the attached terminal session has disconnected ("been hanged up") PIPE - a broken pipe has been detected TERM - synchronous termination has been requested and so on. A simple listing of all signal names can be found by: `perl -e 'use Data::Dumper; print Dumper( \%SIG );'` [download] The default signal handler (which generally just terminates the process as soon as it is invoked) can instead be trapped to your own code (sometimes called an AST or asynchronous system trap) by defining a routine reference as the relevant value in the %SIG hash, e.g. `$SIG{ HUP } = \&MyNoHup;` [download] or `$SIG{ PIPE } = sub { warn ( "Broken pipe ignored; traceback follows:\n +" . Devel::trace() ); }` [download] There are some modules which also assist signal handling, including POSIX One world, one people	[reply] [d/l] [select]