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Re: Bug in rm


From: Bob Proulx
Subject: Re: Bug in rm
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:28:19 -0700

Lance

> pressing ctrl + '\' when prompted to confirm deletion of a file results in
> a core dump.  I am using the GNU fileutils version 4.0 on RedHat Linux
> version 6.2

Thanks for the report.  But that is not a bug.  That is what it is
supposed to do.

The UNIX tty driver intercepts several different input character
sequences and takes action upon them.  One of them is the interrupt
character Control-C which sends the SIGINT signal to the foreground
process group.  Basically anything running on the terminal.  This is
how Control-C interrupts prorams.  The program does not intpret the
input characters, the tty driver does.  To see these run 'stty -a' and
it will print those out.  Your settings sound normal.

Another common signal but perhaps less well known outside the
progamming community is SIGQUIT generated by Control-\.  That action
of that signal is to cause a core dump.  The typical purpose of
generating a core dump is to find why a program has become lost in an
infinite loop.  The debugger can be invoked to examine the memory core
image of the program and to determine what it was last doing when the
memory core dump snapshot was taken.

See 'man 7 signal' for a list of signal types.  See 'man stty' for
documentation on setting the input characters that map to signals.  If
on a linux system try 'help ulimit' and read about the -c option.
Non-programmers typically set that to 'ulimit -c 0'.  See any good
UNIX documentation for general behavior of UNIX operating systems.  I
personally find the O'Reilly nutshell books excellent for the entry
level user.  For more advanced treatment, Richard Steven's textbooks
are again excellent.

Bob




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