Anyone who’s ever been confronted to segfaults and bus error will already be familiar with the idea of signals. We get a SIGSEGV or a SIGBUS which ends our program’s execution without notice, without explanation and without appeal. But what really is a signal? Is it more than just the operating system’s police baton? And how can we send, block and even intercept one within our...
By default, it is difficult to get two processes to communicate with each other. As we’ve seen in a previous article, even parent and child processes don’t share the same memory space. So we need to find ways to establish inter-process communication. One of these communication mechanisms is the pipe. What is a Pipe? A pipe is a section of shared memory meant to facilitate the...
In order to execute another program within ours or to execute part of our program simultaneously, it can often be very useful to create child processes. Then, all we need to do is patiently wait for them to finish their tasks, or, if we’re feeling particularly murderous, kill them prematurely! So what exactly is a process? How can we create child processes, and why wait for them or kill...