How can I check what signals a process is listening to?

Under Linux, you can find the PID of your process, then look at /proc/$PID/status. It contains lines describing which signals are blocked (SigBlk), ignored (SigIgn), or caught (SigCgt).

# cat /proc/1/status
...
SigBlk: 0000000000000000
SigIgn: fffffffe57f0d8fc
SigCgt: 00000000280b2603
...

The number to the right is a bitmask. If you convert it from hex to binary, each 1-bit represents a caught signal, counting from right to left starting with 1. So by interpreting the SigCgt line, we can see that my init process is catching the following signals:

00000000280b2603 ==> 101000000010110010011000000011
                     | |       | ||  |  ||       |`->  1 = SIGHUP
                     | |       | ||  |  ||       `-->  2 = SIGINT
                     | |       | ||  |  |`----------> 10 = SIGUSR1
                     | |       | ||  |  `-----------> 11 = SIGSEGV
                     | |       | ||  `--------------> 14 = SIGALRM
                     | |       | |`-----------------> 17 = SIGCHLD
                     | |       | `------------------> 18 = SIGCONT
                     | |       `--------------------> 20 = SIGTSTP
                     | `----------------------------> 28 = SIGWINCH
                     `------------------------------> 30 = SIGPWR

(I found the number-to-name mapping by running kill -l from bash.)

EDIT: And by popular demand, a script, in POSIX sh.

sigparse () {
    i=0
    # bits="$(printf "16i 2o %X p" "0x$1" | dc)" # variant for busybox
    bits="$(printf "ibase=16; obase=2; %X\n" "0x$1" | bc)"
    while [ -n "$bits" ] ; do
        i="$(expr "$i" + 1)"
        case "$bits" in
            *1) printf " %s(%s)" "$(kill -l "$i")" "$i" ;;
        esac
        bits="${bits%?}"
    done
}

grep "^Sig...:" "/proc/$1/status" | while read a b ; do
        printf "%s%s\n" "$a" "$(sigparse "$b")"
    done # | fmt -t  # uncomment for pretty-printing

On Solaris, run psig on the process id to get a list of signals and how they'll be handled.

For instance:

bash-4.2$ psig $$
11088:  bash
HUP     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
INT     caught  sigint_sighandler   0
QUIT    ignored
ILL     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
TRAP    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
ABRT    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
EMT     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
FPE     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
KILL    default
BUS     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
SEGV    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
SYS     caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
PIPE    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
ALRM    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
TERM    ignored
USR1    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
USR2    caught  termsig_sighandler  0   HUP,INT,ILL,TRAP,ABRT,EMT,FPE,BUS,SEGV,SYS,PIPE,ALRM,TERM,USR1,USR2,VTALRM,XCPU,XFSZ,LOST
CLD     blocked,caught  0x4898e8    RESTART
PWR     default
WINCH   caught  sigwinch_sighandler 0
[...]

which shows that SIGHUP, SIGILL, etc. will all be caught by the same signal handler function termsig_sighandler, which will be run without using any of the flags that could be set via sigaction, and all the signals that will be temporarily masked while the signal handler is running (in this case all the ones using the same signal handler, so it's not reentered while already running). You can also see that SIGQUIT & SIGTERM will be ignored, SIGKILL & SIGPWR use the system default signal actions, and SIGCLD specifies the RESTART flag, so if its signal handler interrupts a system call, the syscall will be restarted.


(This answer is similar to @user18096's answer, in that it creates a script around @Jander's answer.)

I've written a psig script to take a PID (or all PIDs) and create human-readable output from the signal masks in /proc/<PID>/status.

Example output:

% ./psig -a
[     1] Signals Queued: 8/773737
[     1] Signals Pending:
[     1] Signals Pending (Shared):
[     1] Signals Blocked:
[     1] Signals Ignored: SIGPIPE
[     1] Signals Caught: SIGHUP,SIGINT,SIGABRT,SIGUSR1,SIGSEGV,SIGALRM,SIGTERM,SIGCHLD,SIGPWR
...
[ 31001] Signals Queued: 0/773737
[ 31001] Signals Pending:
[ 31001] Signals Pending (Shared):
[ 31001] Signals Blocked: SIGHUP,SIGINT,SIGQUIT,SIGILL,SIGTRAP,SIGABRT,SIGBUS,SIGFPE,SIGUSR1,SIGUSR2,SIGPIPE,SIGALRM,SIGTERM,SIGSTKFLT,SIGCHLD,SIGCONT,SIGTSTP,SIGTTIN,SIGTTOU,SIGURG,SIGXCPU,SIGXFSZ,SIGPROF,SIGWINCH,SIGIO,SIGPWR,SIGSYS,SIGRTMIN,SIGRTMIN+1,SIGRTMIN+2,SIGRTMIN+3,SIGRTMIN+4,SIGRTMIN+5,SIGRTMIN+6,SIGRTMIN+7,SIGRTMIN+8,SIGRTMIN+9,SIGRTMIN+10,SIGRTMIN+11,SIGRTMIN+12,SIGRTMIN+13,SIGRTMIN+14,SIGRTMIN+15,SIGRTMAX-14,SIGRTMAX-13,SIGRTMAX-12,SIGRTMAX-11,SIGRTMAX-10,SIGRTMAX-9,SIGRTMAX-8,SIGRTMAX-7,SIGRTMAX-6,SIGRTMAX-5,SIGRTMAX-4,SIGRTMAX-3,SIGRTMAX-2,SIGRTMAX-1,SIGRTMAX
[ 31001] Signals Ignored: SIGHUP,SIGINT,SIGQUIT,SIGPIPE,SIGXFSZ
[ 31001] Signals Caught: SIGBUS,SIGUSR1,SIGSEGV,SIGUSR2,SIGALRM,SIGTERM,SIGVTALRM

Caveats:

  • This is a Linux specific answer.
  • Might need a relatively new Python version to run the script, it uses with and OrderedDict.

Tags:

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Signals

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