Signal handling is a crucial aspect of Bash scripting that allows you to manage and respond to various system signals. These signals are used for inter-process communication and can significantly impact the behavior of your scripts.
Signals are software interrupts sent to a program to indicate that an important event has occurred. The events can vary from user requests to exceptional runtime occurrences. Some common signals include:
Bash provides the trap
command to handle signals. The basic syntax is:
trap 'commands' SIGNALS
Here, 'commands' is the code to execute when the specified SIGNALS are received.
#!/bin/bash
trap 'echo "Ctrl+C pressed. Exiting..."; exit 1' SIGINT
echo "This script will run until you press Ctrl+C"
while true; do
sleep 1
done
In this example, the script will continue running until the user presses Ctrl+C, at which point it will display a message and exit gracefully.
You can also use trap
to ignore specific signals:
trap '' SIGINT
This will cause the script to ignore the SIGINT signal (Ctrl+C).
To reset a signal handler to its default behavior, use:
trap - SIGNAL
To further enhance your Bash scripting skills, consider exploring these related topics:
By mastering signal handling, you'll be able to create more robust and responsive Bash scripts that can gracefully handle various system events and user interactions.