PRCTL(2)

NAME
prctl - operations on a process

SYNOPSIS
#include <linux/prctl.h>

int prctl(int option, unsigned long arg2, unsigned long arg3 , unsigned long arg4, unsigned long arg5);

DESCRIPTION
prctl is called with a first argument describing what to do (with values defined in <linux/prctl.h>), and further parameters with a significance depending on the first one. At present the only option value defined is PR_SET_PDEATHSIG, and the corresponding call sets the parent process death signal of the current process to arg2 (either a signal value in the range 1..maxsig, or 0 to clear). This is the signal that the current process will get when its parent dies. This value is cleared upon a fork().

RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EINVAL
    The value of option is not recognized, or it is PR_SET_PDEATHSIG and arg2 is not zero or a signal number.

CONFORMING TO
This call is Linux-specific. IRIX has a ptctl system call (also introduced in Linux 2.1.44 as irix_prctl on the MIPS architecture), with prototype

ptrdiff_t prctl(int option, int arg2, int arg3);

and options to get the maximum number of processes per user, get the maximum number of processors the calling process can use, find out whether a specified process is currently blocked, get or set the maximum stack size, etc., etc.

AVAILABILITY
The ptctl() systemcall was introduced in Linux 2.1.57. There is no ptctl() library call as yet.

SEE ALSO
signal(2)