Killing processes and send or respond to signals

Termination of processes is an important task we always come across, including the need to terminate all the instances of a program. The command line provides several options for terminating programs. An important concept regarding processes in Unix-like environments is that of signals . Signals are an inter-process communication mechanism used to interrupt a running process to perform some action. Termination of a program is also performed by using the same technique. This recipe is an introduction to signals and their usage.

Getting ready

Signals are an inter-process mechanism available in Linux. We can interrupt a process using a specific signal, which is associated with an integer value. When a process receives a signal, it responds by executing a signal handler. It is possible to send and receive signals and respond according to the signals in shell scripts as well. KILL is a signal used to terminate a process. The events such as Ctrl ...