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Thank god the man utility was created a long time ago, nowadays it would need to be called something else.

by aw3c2 11y ago

ptaipale 11y ago
You probably have also heard the joke where shells have the "herstory" command. And "kill" system call is eliminated for obvious reasons; processes can decide themselves whether they do anything when they receive the "euthanise" signal. Plus the biased "mail" delivery is replaced by "gendre".
- nailer 11y ago
  Tumblr aside, "kill" is a dumb name anyway. It just send signals, and it's default signal isn't kill, it's terminate. And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating. A better name would have been "signal" (as in the verb), avoid a default signal (how often do you actually send TERM?) and to use lowercase for the signal names consistent with other commands.
  - kps 11y ago
    > And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating. The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone. > how often do you actually send TERM? Each common termination trigger has its own signal so that programs can distinguish the source and potentially act differently for each — HUP for hangup, INTR for tty, TERM for kill(1).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - nailer 11y ago
      > The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone. Sure but 'hangup' is used to reload configs (which may not actually mean terminating the process).
      - kps 11y ago
        That came later, though. Assuming re-purposing of an existing signal, SIGHUP was a smart choice because it's exactly the one that a daemon (not attached to a terminal) will never ‘legitimately’ see. I don't know the history of SIGHUP-to-reload (perhaps a good question for TUHS) but I'd guess it originated outside of Bell or Berkeley, who would have simply added a new signal.

Thank god the man utility was created a long time ago, nowadays it would need to be called something else.

by aw3c2 11y ago

Thank god the man utility was created a long time ago, nowadays it would need to be called something else.

You probably have also heard the joke where shells have the "herstory" command. And "kill" system call is eliminated for obvious reasons; processes can decide themselves whether they do anything when they receive the "euthanise" signal. Plus the biased "mail" delivery is replaced by "gendre".

nailer 11y ago
Tumblr aside, "kill" is a dumb name anyway. It just send signals, and it's default signal isn't kill, it's terminate. And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating. A better name would have been "signal" (as in the verb), avoid a default signal (how often do you actually send TERM?) and to use lowercase for the signal names consistent with other commands.
- kps 11y ago
  > And hangup doesn't have anything to do with terminating. The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone. > how often do you actually send TERM? Each common termination trigger has its own signal so that programs can distinguish the source and potentially act differently for each — HUP for hangup, INTR for tty, TERM for kill(1).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nailer 11y ago
    > The default hangup action is termination because people generally don't want interactive processes sticking around after their I/O is gone. Sure but 'hangup' is used to reload configs (which may not actually mean terminating the process).
    - kps 11y ago
      That came later, though. Assuming re-purposing of an existing signal, SIGHUP was a smart choice because it's exactly the one that a daemon (not attached to a terminal) will never ‘legitimately’ see. I don't know the history of SIGHUP-to-reload (perhaps a good question for TUHS) but I'd guess it originated outside of Bell or Berkeley, who would have simply added a new signal.