Why is SIGINT not propagated to child process when sent to its parent process?
How CTRL+C works
The first thing is to understand how CTRL+C works.
When you press CTRL+C, your terminal emulator sends an ETX character (end-of-text / 0x03).
The TTY is configured such that when it receives this character, it sends a SIGINT to the foreground process group of the terminal. This configuration can be viewed by doing stty -a and looking at intr = ^C;.
The POSIX specification says that when INTR is received, it should send a SIGINT to the foreground process group of that terminal.
What is the foreground process group?
So, now the question is, how do you determine what the foreground process group is? The foreground process group is simply the group of processes which will receive any signals generated by the keyboard (SIGTSTP, SIGINT, etc).
Simplest way to determine the process group ID is to use ps:
ps ax -O tpgid
The second column will be the process group ID.
How do I send a signal to the process group?
Now that we know what the process group ID is, we need to simulate the POSIX behavior of sending a signal to the entire group.
This can be done with kill by putting a - in front of the group ID.
For example, if your process group ID is 1234, you would use:
kill -INT -1234
Simulate CTRL+C using the terminal number.
So the above covers how to simulate CTRL+C as a manual process. But what if you know the TTY number, and you want to simulate CTRL+C for that terminal?
This becomes very easy.
Lets assume $tty is the terminal you want to target (you can get this by running tty | sed 's#^/dev/##' in the terminal).
kill -INT -$(ps h -t $tty -o tpgid | uniq)
This will send a SIGINT to whatever the foreground process group of $tty is.
As vinc17 says, there’s no reason for this to happen.
When you type a signal-generating key sequence
(e.g., Ctrl+C),
the signal is sent to all processes that are attached to
(associated with) the terminal.
There is no such mechanism for signals generated by kill.
However, a command like
kill -SIGINT -12345
will send the signal to all processes in process group 12345; see kill(1) and kill(2). Children of a shell are typically in the shell’s process group (at least, if they’re not asynchronous), so sending the signal to the negative of the PID of the shell may do what you want.
Oops
As vinc17 points out, this doesn’t work for interactive shells. Here’s an alternative that might work:
kill -SIGINT -$(echo $(ps -pPID_of_shell o tpgid=))
ps -pPID_of_shell gets process information on the shell.
o tpgid= tells ps to output only the terminal process group ID, with no header.
If this is less than 10000, ps will display it with leading space(s);
the $(echo …) is a quick trick to strip off leading (and trailing) spaces.
I did get this to work in cursory testing on a Debian machine.
The question contains its own answer. Sending the SIGINT to the cat process with kill is a perfect simulation of what happens when you press Ctrl+C.
To be more precise, the interrupt character (^C by default) sends SIGINT to every process in the terminal's foreground process group. If instead of cat you were running a more complicated command involving multiple processes, you'd have to kill the process group to achieve the same effect as ^C.
When you run any external command without the & background operator, the shell creates a new process group for the command and notifies the terminal that this process group is now in the foreground. The shell is still in its own process group, which is no longer in the foreground. Then the shell waits for the command to exit.
That's where you seem to have become the victim by a common misconception: the idea that the shell is doing something to facilitate the interaction between its child process(es) and the terminal. That's just not true. Once it has done the setup work (process creation, terminal mode setting, creation of pipes and redirection of other file descriptors, and executing the target program) the shell just waits. What you type into cat isn't going through the shell, whether it's normal input or a signal-generating special character like ^C. The cat process has direct access to the terminal through its own file descriptors, and the terminal has the ability to send signals directly to the cat process because it's the foreground process group. The shell has gotten out of the way.
After the cat process dies, the shell will be notified, because it's the parent of the cat process. Then the shell becomes active and puts itself in the foreground again.
Here is an exercise to increase your understanding.
At the shell prompt in a new terminal, run this command:
exec cat
The exec keyword causes the shell to execute cat without creating a child process. The shell is replaced by cat. The PID that formerly belonged to the shell is now the PID of cat. Verify this with ps in a different terminal. Type some random lines and see that cat repeats them back to you, proving that it's still behaving normally in spite of not having a shell process as a parent. What will happen when you press Ctrl+C now?
Answer:
SIGINT is delivered to the cat process, which dies. Because it was the only process on the terminal, the session ends, just as if you'd said "exit" at a shell prompt. In effect cat was your shell for a while.