mastodon.transneptune.net is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Transneptodon is a community for people who like stories, games, games about stories, stories about games, probably also computers, cooking, language, and <em>definitely</em> social justice!

Administered by:

Server stats:

6
active users

got a lot of great answers to "how is the shell involved in handling Ctrl+C" to the effect of one of:

- "the shell is responsible for sending a SIGINT"
- "the shell takes input from the terminal emulator and relays it to the program"
- "it must be handled by the layer above the program, which is the shell"

and while none of those is true, they feel like they totally _could_ be true in a different world. It feels hard to explain why it might be useful to have a more "accurate" mental model

it feels like there's this mental model a lot of people have for the terminal which is a little like this (with some more stuff about signals etc)

and it's not "true" that the shell is in between the terminal emulator and programs in this way but it feels more compelling to me in some ways than the reality.

@b0rk What is the correct version? Is the shell at the same level as the (other) programs? Or is the shell a tiny bit special here?

Owen

@bartavi @b0rk While I can't speak for Julia's perspective, mine is that the shell's primary interface with programs you run is _process control_ - creating process groups, forking new processes into them, executing programs in those forks, awaiting termination, and in some cases sending shell-originated signals to carry out job management.

@bartavi @b0rk The shell is special because it is the parent process, and because it is frequently outside of the process group of the jobs it starts. It's a supervisor process and a user-facing job manager, with a programming language attached for doing process control.