6. Signal Functions

Almost all non-trivial programs must worry about signals. This is especially true for programs that use the S-Lang terminal input/output and screen management routines. Unfortunately, there is no fixed way to handle signals; otherwise, the Unix kernel would take care of all issues regarding signals and the application programmer would never have to worry about them. For this reason, none of the routines in the S-Lang library catch signals; however, some of the routines block the delivery of signals during crucial moments. It is up to the application programmer to install handlers for the various signals of interest.

For the interpreter, the most important signal to worry about is SIGINT. This signal is usually generated when the user presses Ctrl-C at the keyboard. The interpreter checks the value of the SLang_Error variable to determine whether or not it should abort the interpreting process and return control back to the application. This means that if SIGINT is to be used to abort the interpreter, a signal handler for SIGINT should be installed. The handler should set the value of SLang_Error to SL_USER_BREAK.

Applications that use the tty getkey routines or the screen management routines must worry about about signals such as:

     SIGINT                interrupt
     SIGTSTP               stop
     SIGQUIT               quit
     SIGTTOU               background write
     SIGTTIN               background read
     SIGWINCH              window resize

Since a signal can be delivered at any time, it is important for the signal handler to call only functions that can be called from a signal handler. This usually means that such function must be re-entrant. In particular, the SLsmg routines are not re-entrant; hence, they should not be called when a signal is being processed unless the application can ensure that the signal was not delivered while an SLsmg function was called. This statement applies to many other functions such as malloc, or, more generally, any function that calls malloc. The upshot is that the signal handler should not attempt to do too much except set a global variable for the application to look at while not in a signal handler.

The S-Lang library provides two functions for blocking and unblocking the above signals:

    int SLsig_block_signals (void);
    int SLsig_unblock_signals (void);

    void update_screen ()
    {
       SLsig_block_signals ();
       
       /* Call SLsmg functions */
           .
           .
       SLsig_unblock_signals ();
    }