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Best Way to Print Nature of Signal


A C program contains several signal statements to remove a
lock file if the program gets killed:

/*Set up interrupt handler to catch ctrl-C so that lock file can be removed.*/
signal(SIGINT,crash);
signal(SIGBUS,crash);
signal(SIGSEGV,crash);

This part works. Those signals cause the "crash.c" module to
run and get rid of the lock. Is there a standard way to also print
the error the user of the program would have seen so that whoever
runs the program knows that something bad happened? With the
signal handler, the program silently finishes which might make
someone think it was successful when in reality, it just did nothing
and abended. Thank you.
--

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK
Information Technology Division Network Operations Group
Nov 13 '05 #1
3 3492
In article <bn**********@hydrogen.cis.okstate.edu>,
Martin McCormick <ma****@okstate.edu> wrote:

A C program contains several signal statements to remove a
lock file if the program gets killed:

/*Set up interrupt handler to catch ctrl-C so that lock file can be removed.*/
signal(SIGINT,crash);
signal(SIGBUS,crash);
signal(SIGSEGV,crash);

This part works. Those signals cause the "crash.c" module to
run and get rid of the lock. Is there a standard way to also print
the error the user of the program would have seen so that whoever
runs the program knows that something bad happened? With the
signal handler, the program silently finishes which might make
someone think it was successful when in reality, it just did nothing
and abended. Thank you.


Be aware (I have to say this or people will jump on me and start
stuffing socks down my throat) that it's impossible (or at least
Extremely Difficult) to do this without invoking undefined behavior,
because the set of functions you're allowed to call from a signal handler
is extremely limited[1]. There's a good chance, however, that your
implementation defines the behavior of doing something like this to be
"what you would expect", and you're almost certainly already relying on
this to be able to clean up the lock before the program terminates.

For more details on what your implementation (as opposed to the language)
allows you to do in a signal handler, a newsgroup for your platform may
be more useful.

The signal handler gets the signal as its parameter, so a crash() that
looks something like this will probably come close to doing what you want:
--------
void crash(int sig)
{
do_cleanup();
#if USE_ALTERNATIVE_1
/*Alternative 1: Now that we've done the cleanup, let the default
signal handler dump core or whatever
*/
if(signal(sig,SIG_DFL)==SIG_ERR);
{
fputs("This is odd, can't revert to default signal handler\n",stderr);
abort();
}
raise(sig);
/*We shouldn't get here, but to be sure:*/
return;
#else
/*Alternative 2: After doing cleanup, inform user that we terminated
abnormally, but bypass the default signal handler
*/
fprintf(stderr,"Terminating abnormally (signal %d received)\n",sig);
exit();
#endif
}
--------
The boring standardese details:
Alternative #2 isn't allowed for asynchronous signals (which the ones
you're handling probably are), because you're not allowed to call most
standard library functions[1]. You're probably not doing anything worse
than you're already doing in do_cleanup(), though.
Alternative #1 is slightly more problematic, since you're not allowed
to call raise() in a signal handler invoked by calling raise() either.
In practice, though, it (like alternative #2) isn't likely to be any
worse than do_cleanup() is already doing.
dave

[1] To be precise, signal() with a first argument equal to the signal
that resulted in the handler being called or abort() when handling
an asynchronous signal, (rather more generously) anything but raise()
when handling a signal raised by raise().

--
Dave Vandervies dj******@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
If he'd got it wrong (and it happens to us all), several people would
have jumped on him and started stuffing socks down his throat.
--Richard Heathfield in comp.lang.c
Nov 13 '05 #2
ma****@okstate.edu (Martin McCormick) writes:
A C program contains several signal statements to remove a
lock file if the program gets killed:

/*Set up interrupt handler to catch ctrl-C so that lock file can be removed.*/
signal(SIGINT,crash);
signal(SIGBUS,crash);
signal(SIGSEGV,crash);

This part works. Those signals cause the "crash.c" module to
run and get rid of the lock. Is there a standard way to also print
the error the user of the program would have seen so that whoever
runs the program knows that something bad happened? With the
signal handler, the program silently finishes which might make
someone think it was successful when in reality, it just did nothing
and abended. Thank you.


Unfortuately, there is no way to do what you want in standard
C. Any of the standard facilities for writing text to a file
(including the terminal) may not be called from a signal handler
that was called due to an exception. If the handlers were
expected to return normally, then I would have recommended
writing to an object declared with "volatile sig_atomic_t" type
and check for it elsewhere; but as they probably don't
(/shouldn't) return, you can't do that.

<OT>
However, as you seem to be using non-standard signals to begin
with (SIGBUS), and apparently expect ctrl-C to generate SIGINT,
I'll hazard an educated guess that you're on a UNIX-style system
with access to POSIX extensions. So I'd recommend that you post
this question on comp.unix.programmer, where they will very
likely be able to help you take advantage of non-"Standard C"
POSIX extensions that may aid you. I've taken the liberty of
cross-posting this there: but please follow-up to there *only*, if
you will not be discussing ISO C.

POSIX allows you to call such functions as write(), which would
allow you to write a message to the terminal; but there may still
be unflushed data that is in the stdout/stderr buffer, but still
not yet actually written out: you'll need to take care of that.

You might also consider adding whether or not this handler would
be appropriate for other signals such as SIGABRT, SIGHUP, SIGTERM...
</OT>

HTH, HAND.
--
Micah J. Cowan
mi***@cowan.name
Nov 13 '05 #3
Hi Martin!
A C program contains several signal statements to remove a
lock file if the program gets killed:

/*Set up interrupt handler to catch ctrl-C so that lock file can be
removed.*/
signal(SIGINT,crash);
signal(SIGBUS,crash);
signal(SIGSEGV,crash);

This part works. Those signals cause the "crash.c" module to
run and get rid of the lock. Is there a standard way to also print
the error the user of the program would have seen so that whoever
runs the program knows that something bad happened? With the
signal handler, the program silently finishes which might make
someone think it was successful when in reality, it just did nothing
and abended. Thank you.


If you have a POSIX conform implementation, you can use write() (but not
the printf() family!) in your signal handler. The function write() is
async-signal-safe, which means that you can use it without any problem
in signal handler. The standard file descriptor for stdout resp. stderr are
STDOUT_FILENO, resp STDERR_FILENO.

BTW, use sigaction() instead of signal() (though I believe that modern
Un*x implement signal() using sigaction()). This will make your program
more "reliable" wrt. signals catching.

HTH,
Loic.
--
Article posté via l'accès Usenet http://www.mes-news.com
Accès par Nnrp ou Web
Nov 13 '05 #4

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