Operating systems like Linux and Windows uses signals in order to communicate with each other and other components. There are different signal types which define different case and message. In this tutorial, we will learn and explain the SIGINT or Signal Interrupt.

SIGINT or Signal Interrupt

As its name suggests the SIGINT is named as Signal Interrupt which will interrupt the command. This will interrupt the given processes and stop the process. Interrupt signal is depicted as  INTR.

Send SIGINT

There are different ways to send the signal interrupt to the processes. We will use kill command which can send a different signal to the given processes. The SIGINT is numbered as  2 in kill command. So in the following example, we will send SIGINT to the process names firefox.

First, we will learn the process or job ID of the firefox with the pgrep command like below.

$ pgrep firefox

Then we will use kill command to send SIGINT to the process 5042.

$ kill -2 5042

CTRL+C SIGINT

As stated previously there are different way to send SIGINT signal. We can use keyboard combinations to send SIGINT to the active process. We will use  Control+C  or CTRL+C in the bash to the firefox process while it is running.

CTRL+C