24.10 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 differences between the two are:

• BSD Unix represents signal masks as an int bit mask, rather than as a sigset_t object.
• The BSD facilities use a different default for whether an interrupted primitive should fail or resume. The POSIX facilities make system calls fail unless you specify that they should resume. With the BSD facility, the default is to make system calls resume unless you say they should fail. See Interrupted Primitives.

The BSD facilities are declared in signal.h.

• BSD Handler: BSD Function to Establish a Handler.
• Blocking in BSD: BSD Functions for Blocking Signals.