Signal Handlers

Henning Brauer, with Wilhelm Bühler

Signals are used to notify a program of some event in Unix, programs an install signal handlers to catch them and react. The Problem with Signal Handlers ist, that non-atomic operations can get interrupted, and end up in an unexpected state.

The talk will show the problems in detail. It talks about safe function in POSIX, ANSI C and the addional safe functions on current OpenBSD. It will show how to cope with possible solutions and finally show a safe signal handler.

About the Authors

Henning Brauer is an OpenBSD-developer for years now.

Wilhelm Bühler started with Unix 1985 and is still using it.

Copyright © 2005 by EuroBSDCon 2005. All rights reserved.