[techtalk] Is there a Kill -8, too?

[Kelly Lynn Martin]

On Thu, 14 Oct 1999 04:34:13 +0000, jenn at simegen.com said:

>If a process is in the middle of a system call (such as I/O, disk
>reading, whatever), it can't be killed while doing the system call.

This is technically not entirely correct.  You can't kill a process
while it's waiting on a fast resource.  A process waiting on I/O from
a slow device (e.g. a tty or network I/O), or which is in select(2),
sleep(2), or certain other syscalls _can_ receive a signal even though
it's in a syscall.  This is called "interrupting" a syscall and
results in either the syscall returning with EINTR (or, EAGAIN) or
automatically restarting, depending on certain flags set in the signal
handling system for that process.

Kelly

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