1211

submitted 2 months ago by devilish666@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 13 points 2 months ago

You know I’ve known for decades that -9 is basically “nuke it from orbit”, but does anyone know what the “9” actually means or where it came from?

[-] sukhmel@programming.dev 22 points 2 months ago

It's the number of the signal sent, 9 is for SIGKILL. You can send various signals with kill, and depending on how application was made it may react on all signals with dying, or meaningfully process most of them. Afaik, SIGKILL can't be processed by the app, and it always means just that: "die already".

Checked in Wikipedia, that's about right but there are more details I left out, mostly because didn't know about them, too: POSIX signals

[-] ramble81@lemm.ee 4 points 2 months ago

Thank you! That’s what I was looking for.

[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago

In languages like C, your application code can register what is called a signal handler. These functions get called when the process receives a signal. You could do something like reload a config file for example, without the user needing to stop and restart the process.