BSD Signal Handling (The GNU C Library)

### 25.10 BSD Signal Handling ¶

This section describes alternative signal handling functions derived from BSD Unix. These facilities were an advance, in their time; today, they are mostly obsolete, and supported mainly for compatibility with BSD Unix.

There are many similarities between the BSD and POSIX signal handling facilities, because the POSIX facilities were inspired by the BSD facilities. Besides having different names for all the functions to avoid conflicts, the main difference between the two is that BSD Unix represents signal masks as an `int` bit mask, rather than as a `sigset_t` object.

The BSD facilities are declared in `signal.h`.

Function: `int` siginterrupt `(int signum, int failflag)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe const:sigintr | AS-Unsafe | AC-Unsafe corrupt | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This function specifies which approach to use when certain primitives are interrupted by handling signal signum. If failflag is false, signal signum restarts primitives. If failflag is true, handling signum causes these primitives to fail with error code `EINTR`. See Primitives Interrupted by Signals.

  This function has been replaced by the `SA_RESTART` flag of the `sigaction` function. See Advanced Signal Handling.

Macro: `int` sigmask `(int signum)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Safe | AC-Safe | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This macro returns a signal mask that has the bit for signal signum set. You can bitwise-OR the results of several calls to `sigmask` together to specify more than one signal. For example,

      (sigmask (SIGTSTP) | sigmask (SIGSTOP)
       | sigmask (SIGTTIN) | sigmask (SIGTTOU))

  specifies a mask that includes all the job-control stop signals.

  This macro has been replaced by the `sigset_t` type and the associated signal set manipulation functions. See Signal Sets.

Function: `int` sigblock `(int mask)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe lock/hurd | AC-Unsafe lock/hurd | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This function is equivalent to `sigprocmask` (see Process Signal Mask) with a how argument of `SIG_BLOCK`: it adds the signals specified by mask to the calling process’s set of blocked signals. The return value is the previous set of blocked signals.

Function: `int` sigsetmask `(int mask)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Safe | AS-Unsafe lock/hurd | AC-Unsafe lock/hurd | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This function is equivalent to `sigprocmask` (see Process Signal Mask) with a how argument of `SIG_SETMASK`: it sets the calling process’s signal mask to mask. The return value is the previous set of blocked signals.

Function: `int` sigpause `(int mask)` ¶

  Preliminary: | MT-Unsafe race:sigprocmask/!bsd!linux | AS-Unsafe lock/hurd | AC-Unsafe lock/hurd | See POSIX Safety Concepts.

  This function is the equivalent of `sigsuspend` (see Waiting for a Signal): it sets the calling process’s signal mask to mask, and waits for a signal to arrive. On return the previous set of blocked signals is restored.