signal

signal

• A condition that may or may not be reported during program execution. For example, SIGFPE is the signal used to represent erroneous arithmetic operations such as a division by zero.

• A mechanism by which a process may be notified of, or affected by, an event occurring in the system. Examples of such events include hardware exceptions and specific actions by processes. The term signal is also used to refer to the event itself. X/Open. ISO.1.