[colug-432] Computer Programmer Productivity Ratio

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 12:51 PM, R P Herrold <herrold at owlriver.com> wrote:
> fwiw, and from the last time I read the kill man page, while
> there are conventional assignments for, say, 9 and 1, these
> are not mandated ... just convention of a given implementation

What each app does when it receives a SIGHUP is entirely
implementation-dependent.  Back in the mists of time, it was just a
signal to the tty driver that the modem hung up (and to disconnect the
session)  I'd wager that its functional overloading since then is
because it's the lowest number and wasn't used for other purposes
around the machine and was "safe" to use for non-tty-based things.  I
suppose SIGKILL = -9 is effectively just a convention, but to change
it, you'd have to start by changing the init process, so I'd call it a
rather rigidly-established convention at the very least.

Ultimately, you _could_ randomize the signal number mapping, but
besides recompiling the entire OS, you'd have more than a few scripts
to search through (and it would break many apps distributed in
pre-compiled form).

-ethan