Process Control and Users

Sending signals to a process

Beyond fork(), exec(), and wait(), there are a lot of other interfaces for interacting with processes in UNIX systems. For example, the kill() system call is used to send signals to a process, including directives to pause, die, and other useful imperatives. For convenience, in most UNIX shells, certain keystroke combinations are configured to deliver a specific signal to the currently running process; for example, control-c sends a SIGINT (interrupt) ...