2.3 Signal specifications

A signal may be a signal name like ‘HUP’, or a signal number like ‘1’, or an exit status of a process terminated by the signal. A signal name can be given in canonical form or prefixed by ‘SIG’. The case of the letters is ignored. The following signal names and numbers are supported on all POSIX compliant systems:

HUP

1. Hangup.

INT

2. Terminal interrupt.

QUIT

3. Terminal quit.

ABRT

6. Process abort.

KILL

9. Kill (cannot be caught or ignored).

ALRM

14. Alarm Clock.

TERM

15. Termination.

Other supported signal names have system-dependent corresponding numbers. All systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001 also support the following signals:

BUS

Access to an undefined portion of a memory object.

CHLD

Child process terminated, stopped, or continued.

CONT

Continue executing, if stopped.

FPE

Erroneous arithmetic operation.

ILL

Illegal Instruction.

PIPE

Write on a pipe with no one to read it.

SEGV

Invalid memory reference.

STOP

Stop executing (cannot be caught or ignored).

TSTP

Terminal stop.

TTIN

Background process attempting read.

TTOU

Background process attempting write.

URG

High bandwidth data is available at a socket.

USR1

User-defined signal 1.

USR2

User-defined signal 2.

POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems that support the XSI extension also support the following signals:

POLL

Pollable event.

PROF

Profiling timer expired.

SYS

Bad system call.

TRAP

Trace/breakpoint trap.

VTALRM

Virtual timer expired.

XCPU

CPU time limit exceeded.

XFSZ

File size limit exceeded.

POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems that support the XRT extension also support at least eight real-time signals called ‘RTMIN’, ‘RTMIN+1’, …, ‘RTMAX-1’, ‘RTMAX’.