How many signals can be queued on a process that has all signals blocked? What if I use sigqueue()
more often then that limit? Will those signals not be queued? Will I get an error?
Signal queue depth in Linux
signals
Related Solutions
In addition to processes calling kill(2)
, some signals are sent by the kernel (or sometimes by the process itself) in various circumstances:
- Terminal drivers send signals corresponding to various events:
- Key press notifications:
SIGINT
(please go back to the main loop) on Ctrl+C,SIGQUIT
(please quit immediately) on Ctrl+\,SIGTSTP
(please suspend) on Ctrl+Z. The keys can be changed with thestty
command. SIGTTIN
andSIGTTOU
are sent when a background process tries to read or write to its controlling terminal.SIGWINCH
is sent to signal that the size of the terminal window has changed.SIGHUP
is sent to signal that the terminal has disappeared (historically because your modem had hung up, nowadays usually because you've closed the terminal emulator window).
- Key press notifications:
- Some processor traps can generate a signal. The details are architecture and system dependent; here are typical examples:
- A number of signals notify the target process that some system event has occured:
SIGALRM
notifies that a timer set by the process has expired. Timers can be set withalarm
,setitimer
and others.SIGCHLD
notifies a process that one of its children has died.SIGPIPE
is generated when a process tries to write to a pipe when the reading end has been closed (the idea is that if you runfoo | bar
andbar
exits,foo
gets killed by aSIGPIPE
).SIGPOLL
(also calledSIGIO
) notifies the process that a pollable event has occured. POSIX specifies pollable events registered through theI_SETSIG
ioctl
. Many systems allow pollable events on any file descriptor, set via theO_ASYNC
fcntl
flag. A related signal isSIGURG
, which notifies of urgent data on a device (registered via theI_SETSIG
ioctl
) or socket.- On some systems,
SIGPWR
is sent to all processes when the UPS signals that a power failure is imminent.
These lists are not exhaustive. Standard signals are defined in signal.h
.
Most signals can be caught and handled (or ignored) by the application. The only two portable signals that cannot be caught are SIGKILL
(just die) and STOP
(stop execution).
SIGSEGV
(segmentation fault) and its cousin SIGBUS
(bus error) can be caught, but it's a bad idea unless you really know what you're doing. A common application for catching them is printing a stack trace or other debug information. A more advanced application is to implement some kind of in-process memory management, or to trap bad instructions in virtual machine engines.
Finally, let me mention something that isn't a signal. When you press Ctrl+D at the beginning of a line in a program that's reading input from the terminal, this tells the program that the end of the input file is reached. This isn't a signal: it's transmitted via the input/output API. Like Ctrl+C and friends, the key can be configured with stty
.
There doesn't seem to be a pure bash solution.
Ksh (both ksh93 and mksh) unblock all signals (tested on Debian wheezy), so if you can use ksh instead of bash, it will solve your problem.
If you can't change the fact that bash is invoked, you might be able to make bash execute ksh and make ksh execute the child process: replace
bash -c '…; exec child_process'
by
bash -c '…; exec ksh -c "exec child_process"'
Beware of quoting issues!
Ksh is fast and easy to use, but often not part of the default installation. If that is an issue, you can use Perl instead, which is part of the default installation in most non-embedded Linux systems.
perl -e '
use POSIX;
$s = POSIX::SigSet->new(); $s->fillset();
sigprocmask(1, $s, $s) or die $!; # 1 = SIG_UNBLOCK
exec "child_process"'
Best Answer
With ulimit
With plain C
You may, of course, get a value other than 62384, which is what I got on my system.