On Jun 1, 2006, at 12:03 PM, Dominic Blais wrote: While accessing invalid memory regions (segfault, signal 11) is the most common source of crashing errors in C/C++, there are many other normally unhandled traps that can cause the program to crash (SIGFPE is a notably common one in numerical software). Yes, but many of these signals do not terminate the process. A better list to look at is from 'man signal', which shows the default action: No Name Default Action Description 1 SIGHUP terminate process terminal line hangup 2 SIGINT terminate process interrupt program 3 SIGQUIT create core image quit program 4 SIGILL create core image illegal instruction 5 SIGTRAP create core image trace trap 6 SIGABRT create core image abort program (formerly SIGIOT) 7 SIGEMT create core image emulate instruction executed 8 SIGFPE create core image floating-point exception 9 SIGKILL terminate process kill program 10 SIGBUS create core image bus error 11 SIGSEGV create core image segmentation violation 12 SIGSYS create core image non-existent system call invoked 13 SIGPIPE terminate process write on a pipe with no reader 14 SIGALRM terminate process real-time timer expired 15 SIGTERM terminate process software termination signal 16 SIGURG discard signal urgent condition present on socket 17 SIGSTOP stop process stop (cannot be caught or ignored) 18 SIGTSTP stop process stop signal generated from keyboard 19 SIGCONT discard signal continue after stop 20 SIGCHLD discard signal child status has changed 21 SIGTTIN stop process background read attempted from control terminal 22 SIGTTOU stop process background write attempted to control terminal 23 SIGIO discard signal I/O is possible on a descriptor (see fcntl(2)) 24 SIGXCPU terminate process cpu time limit exceeded (see setrlimit(2)) 25 SIGXFSZ terminate process file size limit exceeded (see setrlimit(2)) 26 SIGVTALRM terminate process virtual time alarm (see setitimer(2)) 27 SIGPROF terminate process profiling timer alarm (see setitimer(2)) 28 SIGWINCH discard signal Window size change 29 SIGINFO discard signal status request from keyboard 30 SIGUSR1 terminate process User defined signal 1 31 SIGUSR2 terminate process User defined signal 2 32 SIGTHR terminate process thread interrupt Note also that several of the signals that do terminate the process are very unlikely to be the cause of typical "bug crashes": SIGUSR1/2, SIGXCPU, SIGXFSZ, etc.
While accessing invalid memory regions (segfault, signal 11) is the most common source of crashing errors in C/C++, there are many other normally unhandled traps that can cause the program to crash (SIGFPE is a notably common one in numerical software).