^C vs SIGKILL [LWN.net]

^C vs SIGKILL

Posted Apr 21, 2008 7:18 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: ^C vs SIGKILL by willy
Parent article: Stable kernel 2.6.25 released

I think leaving bash hung-up until a system administrator sends KILL to it is acceptable in
this circumstance. I'd say the same about server applications I've written which have a signal
handler only to write a log message explaining why they died (otherwise you have mysteries
where the server isn't running and no-one knows why... until they discover a division by zero
error weeks later and realise it had exited on SIGFPE)

The real frustration isn't that Ctrl-C doesn't work, but that nothing works, and you've fixed
that. Having Ctrl-C be effective in such circumstances most of the time is merely a welcome
bonus. Similarly making these processes able to be killed by the OOM killer is also a bonus.

Is this an example of genuine innovation from Linux (even if it is one that most people won't
understand) ? Or is it copied from some other Unix which I'm not familiar with ?

(Log in to post comments)

^C vs SIGKILL

Posted Apr 21, 2008 11:52 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

I think you only find it acceptable because it's such a huge improvement over what went before
;-)

This idea, as far as I'm aware, is the product of Linus' Big Brain back in 2002.  The strange
thing is that nobody bothered to do it before now.