How to trigger SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2?

Question

I'm getting acquainted with signals in C. I can't figure out what kind of signals SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 are and how can I trigger them. Can anyone please explain it to me?

Answer 1

They are signals that application developers use. The kernel shouldn't ever send these to a process. You can send them using kill(2) or using the utility kill(1).

If you intend to use signals for synchronization you might want to check real-time signals (there's more of them, they are queued, their delivery order is guaranteed etc).

Answer 2

They are user-defined signals, so they aren't triggered by any particular action. You can explicitly send them programmatically:

#include <signal.h>

kill(pid, SIGUSR1);

where pid is the process id of the receiving process. At the receiving end, you can register a signal handler for them:

#include <signal.h>

void my_handler(int signum)
{
    if (signum == SIGUSR1)
    {
        printf("Received SIGUSR1!\n");
    }
}

signal(SIGUSR1, my_handler);

Answer 3

terminal 1

dd if=/dev/sda of=debian.img

terminal 2

killall -SIGUSR1 dd

go back to terminal 1

34292201+0 records in
34292200+0 records out
17557606400 bytes (18 GB) copied, 1034.7 s, 17.0 MB/s