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Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling


An introduction to signals: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023.

Again, it’s a good idea to make your system fault-tolerant and resilient to sudden termination—for example, by serializing state in a persistent store—but at the very least, signals give you the opportunity to perform cleanup that can otherwise be difficult to do. (This is quite easy to fit into our async Rust model: the worker tasks, on receiving a broadcast message, send the corresponding signal to the process groups that they’re responsible for.) An abandoned microwave tower in the Santa Monica Mountains, California ( source).Signals are a fundamental part of the computing landscape, a legacy of design decisions made decades ago.

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