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From: miw@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK (Mario Wolczko)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: signals being ignored by xterm
Message-ID: <1262@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK>
Date: Mon, 7-Sep-87 08:14:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: mucs.1262
Posted: Mon Sep  7 08:14:34 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 9-Sep-87 02:07:49 EDT
References: <1256@mucs.UX.CS.MAN.AC.UK> <1894@sol.ARPA> <1895@sol.ARPA>
Reply-To: miw@mucs.UUCP (Mario Wolczko)
Organization: Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
Lines: 48

>In article <1894@sol.ARPA> I wrote:
>|I saw this before with a user here. What are you starting up the xterm
>|with? If it is a sh script with &, then remember sh disables interrupt
>|and quit for backgrounded processes. This ignore gets inherited by the
>|children. Apparently csh resets before spawning so csh scripts are ok.
>
>Ken, you twit, you shouldn't post articles before breakfast. Ignore
>previous distortion of truth.
>
>The user in question was starting up xterm with a backgrounded sh
>script.  He was also the rare "/bin/sh login shell" user in our
>department.  Since the backgrounded sh script had SIGINT and SIGQUIT
>turned off, his xterm sh was ignoring these. Csh, on the other hand,
>turns on SIGINT and SIGQUIT catching when it starts up as an interative
>shell.  So the other (csh) users never encountered any problem. Xtools
>users also had no problems with either login shell.
>
>So, do you have this combination: xterm started from a sh script with &
>and a login shell of /bin/sh?

Got it (nearly) in two!  I start xterm in one of two ways:
1. Automatically when I log in, with a shell script that is run from xinit,
   and,
2. From a menu in menuwm, using the line:
      shell:          !"xterm"
   in my .menuwmrc.
As you correctly guessed I'm a Bourne man (actually, a Bourne-derivative
man, with job control and history [much nicer than csh, but let's not get
into that one]).

So it would seem that most of the world's X-users are also csh users, and
haven't encountered the problem before.

Q. Which program (xterm or shell) is wrong?  Should interactive programs
   always turn SIGINT and SIGQUIT back on?  My feeling is that there are
   many programs that don't care whether they're interactive or not, and
   could possibly be used as "shells", so that xterm and menuwm (and uwm
   too) are at fault here.  Still, I've fixed the problem now, so I'm not
   too bothered either way.

Mario

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