Signals and dbx

[Erik Naggum]

In article <15091 at smoke.brl.mil>, Doug Gwyn writes:
   In article <6992 at alpha.cam.nist.gov>, Sean Sheridan Coleman X5672 writes:
   >Does ^D produce a signal ?

   Not under normal circumstances.  Usually that character is used to
   delimit chunks of input text; whatever has been typed (in canonicalizing
   mode) up to the so-called EOF character is made available for reading
   and the EOF character is discarded.  No signal is involved.

Perhaps the special case that makes people believe that ^D is more
special than it is should be elaborated upon.  When you have _not_
typed anything before the so-called EOF character, the read(2) system
call returns the number of characters read, which is 0.  Recall that 0
from read(2) is the canonical End Of File indication, unless other
provisions have been made (such as O_NDELAY).

--
[Erik Naggum]					     <enag at ifi.uio.no>
Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway			   <erik at naggum.uu.no>