Linux processes and signals
How Linux runs and controls programs: processes and PIDs, parents, children and zombies, viewing processes with ps, top and htop, foreground and background jobs, signals such as SIGTERM, SIGKILL and SIGHUP, graceful shutdown in your own code, nohup, and signals inside Docker containers.
CodexBash, , 6 min read
Every running program on Linux is a process: your shell, a web server, a database, a build. Knowing how to find processes, understand their relationships and control them with signals is basic operational literacy, and it matters for application developers too. A service that ignores SIGTERM loses requests on every deployment; a container whose main process mishandles signals takes ten seconds to stop and leaves work half-done. This article covers the essentials, with commands you can try immediately.
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