What are the interrupts that user can invoke in terminal

I know of one interrupt, i.e Ctrl+C which can be invoked by user in terminal.(can it be invoked elsewhere?)

Are there any other interrupts that can also be invoked by user?

Solution 1:

As far as I know, the only signals that have a default keyboard shortcut in the shell are SIGINT (Ctrl + C) to stop a process and SIGSTOP (Ctrl + Z) to pause one.

Apparently, as Radu Rădeanu just taught me, there is also Ctrl+\ which is mapped to SIGQUIT.

You can find a list of all signals and what they do in man 7 signal:

   Signal     Value     Action   Comment
   ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   SIGHUP        1       Term    Hangup detected on controlling terminal
                                 or death of controlling process
   SIGINT        2       Term    Interrupt from keyboard
   SIGQUIT       3       Core    Quit from keyboard
   SIGILL        4       Core    Illegal Instruction
   SIGABRT       6       Core    Abort signal from abort(3)
   SIGFPE        8       Core    Floating point exception
   SIGKILL       9       Term    Kill signal
   SIGSEGV      11       Core    Invalid memory reference
   SIGPIPE      13       Term    Broken pipe: write to pipe with no
                                 readers
   SIGALRM      14       Term    Timer signal from alarm(2)

   SIGTERM      15       Term    Termination signal
   SIGUSR1   30,10,16    Term    User-defined signal 1
   SIGUSR2   31,12,17    Term    User-defined signal 2
   SIGCHLD   20,17,18    Ign     Child stopped or terminated
   SIGCONT   19,18,25    Cont    Continue if stopped
   SIGSTOP   17,19,23    Stop    Stop process
   SIGTSTP   18,20,24    Stop    Stop typed at terminal
   SIGTTIN   21,21,26    Stop    Terminal input for background process
   SIGTTOU   22,22,27    Stop    Terminal output for background process
   SIGBUS      10,7,10     Core    Bus error (bad memory access)
   SIGPOLL                 Term    Pollable event (Sys V).
                                   Synonym for SIGIO
   SIGPROF     27,27,29    Term    Profiling timer expired
   SIGSYS      12,31,12    Core    Bad argument to routine (SVr4)
   SIGTRAP        5        Core    Trace/breakpoint trap
   SIGURG      16,23,21    Ign     Urgent condition on socket (4.2BSD)
   SIGVTALRM   26,26,28    Term    Virtual alarm clock (4.2BSD)
   SIGXCPU     24,24,30    Core    CPU time limit exceeded (4.2BSD)
   SIGXFSZ     25,25,31    Core    File size limit exceeded (4.2BSD)

   SIGIOT         6        Core    IOT trap. A synonym for SIGABRT
   SIGEMT       7,-,7      Term
   SIGSTKFLT    -,16,-     Term    Stack fault on coprocessor (unused)
   SIGIO       23,29,22    Term    I/O now possible (4.2BSD)
   SIGCLD       -,-,18     Ign     A synonym for SIGCHLD
   SIGPWR      29,30,19    Term    Power failure (System V)
   SIGINFO      29,-,-             A synonym for SIGPWR
   SIGLOST      -,-,-      Term    File lock lost (unused)
   SIGWINCH    28,28,20    Ign     Window resize signal (4.3BSD, Sun)
   SIGUNUSED    -,31,-     Core    Synonymous with SIGSYS

You can see the signals that are available on your system with kill -l:

$ kill -l
 1) SIGHUP      2) SIGINT        3) SIGQUIT      4) SIGILL      5) SIGTRAP
 6) SIGABRT     7) SIGBUS        8) SIGFPE       9) SIGKILL     10) SIGUSR1
11) SIGSEGV     12) SIGUSR2     13) SIGPIPE     14) SIGALRM     15) SIGTERM
16) SIGSTKFLT   17) SIGCHLD     18) SIGCONT     19) SIGSTOP     20) SIGTSTP
21) SIGTTIN     22) SIGTTOU     23) SIGURG      24) SIGXCPU     25) SIGXFSZ
26) SIGVTALRM   27) SIGPROF     28) SIGWINCH    29) SIGIO       30) SIGPWR
31) SIGSYS      34) SIGRTMIN    35) SIGRTMIN+1  36) SIGRTMIN+2  37) SIGRTMIN+3
38) SIGRTMIN+4  39) SIGRTMIN+5  40) SIGRTMIN+6  41) SIGRTMIN+7  42) SIGRTMIN+8
43) SIGRTMIN+9  44) SIGRTMIN+10 45) SIGRTMIN+11 46) SIGRTMIN+12 47) SIGRTMIN+13
48) SIGRTMIN+14 49) SIGRTMIN+15 50) SIGRTMAX-14 51) SIGRTMAX-13 52) SIGRTMAX-12
53) SIGRTMAX-11 54) SIGRTMAX-10 55) SIGRTMAX-9  56) SIGRTMAX-8  57) SIGRTMAX-7
58) SIGRTMAX-6  59) SIGRTMAX-5  60) SIGRTMAX-4  61) SIGRTMAX-3  62) SIGRTMAX-2
63) SIGRTMAX-1  64) SIGRTMAX    

Note that there are many SIGRTMAX and SIGRTMIN signals, the Linux kernel supports 32 different signals but the range of signals actually supported will depend on the glibc implementation on your system.

Solution 2:

The SIGQUIT signal is similar to SIGINT (produced by Ctrl+C), except that it's controlled by a different key — the QUIT character, usually Ctrl+\ — and produces a core dump when it terminates the process, just like a program error signal. You can think of this as a program error condition "detected" by the user.

So, Ctrl+\ (Ctrl + Backslash) may be what you want.

Reference: Termination Signals.