Killing a Haskell binary

Question

If I press Ctrl+C, this throws an exception (always in thread 0?). You can catch this if you want - or, more likely, run some cleanup and then rethrow it. But the usual result is to bring the program to a halt, one way or another.

Now suppose I use the Unix kill command. As I understand it, kill basically sends a (configurable) Unix signal to the specified process.

How does the Haskell RTS respond to this? Is it documented somewhere? I would imagine that sending SIGTERM would have the same effect as pressing Ctrl+C, but I don't know that for a fact...

(And, of course, you can use kill to send signals that have nothing to do with killing at all. Again, I would imagine that the RTS would ignore, say, SIGHUP or SIGPWR, but I don't know for sure.)

Answer 1

Googling "haskell catch sigterm" led me to System.Posix.Signals of the unix package, which has a rather nice looking system for catching and handling these signals. Just scroll down to the "Handling Signals" section.

EDIT: A trivial example:

import System.Posix.Signals
import Control.Concurrent (threadDelay)
import Control.Concurrent.MVar

termHandler :: MVar () -> Handler
termHandler v = CatchOnce $ do
    putStrLn "Caught SIGTERM"
    putMVar v ()

loop :: MVar () -> IO ()
loop v = do
    putStrLn "Still running"
    threadDelay 1000000
    val <- tryTakeMVar v
    case val of
        Just _ -> putStrLn "Quitting" >> return ()
        Nothing -> loop v

main = do
    v <- newEmptyMVar
    installHandler sigTERM (termHandler v) Nothing
    loop v

Notice that I had to use an MVar to inform loop that it was time to quit. I tried using exitSuccess from System.Exit, but since termHandler executes in a thread that isn't the main one, it can't cause the program to exit. There might be an easier way to do it, but I've never used this module before so I don't know of one. I tested this on Ubuntu 12.10.