rt_sigprocmask (2)
Leading comments
Copyright (c) 2005 Michael Kerrisk based on earlier work by faith@cs.unc.edu and Mike Battersby <mib@deakin.edu.au> %%%LICENSE_START(VERBATIM) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under ...
NAME
sigprocmask, rt_sigprocmask - examine and change blocked signalsSYNOPSIS
#include <signal.h>int sigprocmask(int how, const sigset_t *set, sigset_t *oldset);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
sigprocmask(): _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 1 || _XOPEN_SOURCE || _POSIX_SOURCE
DESCRIPTION
sigprocmask() is used to fetch and/or change the signal mask of the calling thread. The signal mask is the set of signals whose delivery is currently blocked for the caller (see also signal(7) for more details).The behavior of the call is dependent on the value of how, as follows.
- SIG_BLOCK
- The set of blocked signals is the union of the current set and the set argument.
- SIG_UNBLOCK
- The signals in set are removed from the current set of blocked signals. It is permissible to attempt to unblock a signal which is not blocked.
- SIG_SETMASK
- The set of blocked signals is set to the argument set.
If
oldset
is non-NULL, the previous value of the signal mask is stored in
oldset.
If
set
is NULL, then the signal mask is unchanged (i.e.,
how
is ignored),
but the current value of the signal mask is nevertheless returned in
oldset
(if it is not NULL).
The use of
sigprocmask()
is unspecified in a multithreaded process; see
pthread_sigmask(3).
RETURN VALUE
sigprocmask() returns 0 on success and -1 on error. In the event of an error, errno is set to indicate the cause.ERRORS
- EFAULT
- The set or oldset argument points outside the process's allocated address space.
- EINVAL
- The value specified in how was invalid.
CONFORMING TO
POSIX.1-2001, POSIX.1-2008.NOTES
It is not possible to block SIGKILL or SIGSTOP. Attempts to do so are silently ignored.Each of the threads in a process has its own signal mask.
A child created via fork(2) inherits a copy of its parent's signal mask; the signal mask is preserved across execve(2).
If SIGBUS, SIGFPE, SIGILL, or SIGSEGV are generated while they are blocked, the result is undefined, unless the signal was generated by kill(2), sigqueue(3), or raise(3).
See sigsetops(3) for details on manipulating signal sets.
C library/kernel differences
The glibc wrapper function for sigprocmask() silently ignores attempts to block the two real-time signals that are used internally by the NPTL threading implementation. See nptl(7) for details.The original Linux system call was named sigprocmask(). However, with the addition of real-time signals in Linux 2.2, the fixed-size, 32-bit sigset_t type supported by that system call was no longer fit for purpose. Consequently, a new system call, rt_sigprocmask(), was added to support an enlarged sigset_t type. The new system call takes a fourth argument, size_t sigsetsize, which specifies the size in bytes of the signal sets in set and oldset. This argument is currently required to have the value sizeof(sigset_t) (or the error EINVAL results). The glibc sigprocmask() wrapper function hides these details from us, transparently calling rt_sigprocmask() when the kernel provides it.