Equivalent of ctrl c in command to cancel a program

I am running a long linux program in a remote machine, and I want to stop it, but my problem is that if I use the kill command then the program will exit without saving results. Normally what I do to finish the program is use Ctrl+C and in that case the program saves the results, but right now I am not in the machine that is running the session so I cannot press Ctrl+C.

My question is: is there any way to do in a remote way the equivalent of Ctrl+C?

Solution 1:

Try:

kill -SIGINT processPIDHere

Basically Ctrl C sends the SIGINT (interrupt) signal while kill sends the SIGTERM (termination) signal by default unless you specify the signal to send.

Solution 2:

ctrl c just sends a SIGINT signal, but there is some other signals that is a little more soft. http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libc/Termination-Signals.html

I think that you can use the the kill command to send some other signal. (see man kill for more info)

Solution 3:

Here's an example for mongod

To start the daemon from the command line:

mongod &

Then later

kill -SIGINT `pgrep mongod`

Solution 4:

If you control the long-running remote process, you could install a signal handler for SIGTERM (see man signal and man sigaction and the many SO questions on this topic), to cleanup nicely before dieing.

That is a very common thing to do.

Solution 5:

Keep in mind as well in your signal handler, that it is like an interrupt handler in that you are very limited as to what you are allowed to do in it without corrupting the rest of your program. The best thing you can do here is set an atomic_t "should_quit" variable.