Skip to content

Architecture: Implement proper POSIX signal handling (SIGINT / SIGTSTP / SIGCHLD) #93

Description

@exlier

Problem

  • Signal handling is ad-hoc across the codebase. SIGINT/SIGTSTP are not consistently routed to the correct process group; SIGCHLD handling is incomplete, causing missed child status updates and occasional zombies.

Impact

  • Ctrl-C/Ctrl-Z behave inconsistently. Job control (fg/bg) is unreliable. Child processes may become zombies or their exit/stop/continue events are missed, causing incorrect job states.

How to reproduce

  • Run a foreground pipeline that spawns multiple processes and press Ctrl-C / Ctrl-Z repeatedly.
  • Start background jobs and rapidly start/stop others; check for zombies with ps or wait failures.

Acceptance criteria

  • Shell consistently manages process groups (setpgid/setsid and tcsetpgrp usage) so job control works like POSIX shells.
  • SIGCHLD is handled reliably: all child exits/stops/continues are observed and the internal job table is updated; no zombie processes are left.
  • No unsafe or non-async-safe functions are executed directly in signal handlers.
  • Include tests or a test harness that simulate multiple child lifecycles and validate behavior.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions