Unix Socket Programming Interview Question:

Is there any advantage to handling the signal, rather than just ignoring it and checking for the EPIPE error? Are there any useful parameters passed to the signal catching function?

Submitted by: Administrator

See that send()/write() can generate SIGPIPE. Is there any advantage to handling the signal, rather than just ignoring it and checking for the EPIPE error? Are there any useful parameters passed to the signal catching function?

In general, the only parameter passed to a signal handler is the signal number that caused it to be invoked. Some systems have optional additional parameters, but they are no use to you in this case.

My advice is to just ignore SIGPIPE as you suggest. That's what I do in just about all of my socket code; errno values are easier to handle than signals (in fact, the first revision of the FAQ failed to mention SIGPIPE in that context; I'd got so used to ignoring it...)

There is one situation where you should not ignore SIGPIPE; if you are going to exec() another program with stdout redirected to a socket. In this case it is probably wise to set SIGPIPE to SIG_DFL before doing the exec().
Submitted by: Administrator