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The other day I experienced a halt in my python application with sigabrt, but I knew that the init should send a sigkill signal. I'm curious what's the difference between them, if any? Can someone give me some resources to read more about this?

Rohola Zandie
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1 Answers1

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There is the explanation from:

www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-SIGABRT-and-SIGKILL-in-Linux

SIGKILL and SIGABRT are two type of signals that are sent to process to terminate it.

SIGKILL is equivalent of "kill -9" and is used to kill zombie processes, processes that are already dead and waiting for their parent processes to reap them. SIGABRT is equivalent of "kill -6" and is used to terminate/abort running processes.

SIGKILL signal cannot be caught or ignored and the receiving process cannot perform any clean-up upon receiving this signal. SIGABRT signal can be caught, but it cannot be blocked.

So in other words, your program can react on SIGABRT correctly and launch gracefull exit.

Jaroslav Kucera
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