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The Signal Belfry

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SIG-008 · Stop and resume

SIGCONT

The resume ring: it wakes whatever was frozen.

The other half of the pause: it resumes a process stopped by SIGSTOP or SIGTSTP. It holds a unique privilege in the tower — it wakes the process even if the signal is blocked or ignored, because the resumption happens before any handler.

Day to day it is the shell that rings it: fg and bg send SIGCONT before handing the process back to the foreground or the background. A handler can still be hung on it — useful for redrawing whatever changed while the program slept.

$ kill -STOP $(pidof -s backup.sh)
(peak hour; the server breathes)
$ kill -CONT $(pidof -s backup.sh)
(the backup picks up where it left off)
Frozen at the peak, thawed in the small hours.