Skip to content
The Signal Belfry

/static/campanario/en/sino/sigquit/

Menu

SIG-003 · Termination

SIGQUIT

Ctrl+\ — ends things like its sibling, but leaves a core dump as a keepsake.

The quit key was designed for the programmer, not the user: besides ending the foreground process, it dumps the memory image into a core file, ready for the autopsy in a debugger.

Today it is plan B for whoever watches Ctrl+C get swallowed by a stuck program: QUIT is rarely caught. On systemd systems, coredumpctl lists what the ring left behind.

$ ./servidor-preso
^\Quit (core dumped)
$ coredumpctl list --since=-5min
TIME                          PID  SIG      COREFILE  EXE
qui 2026-08-07 14:02 -03     4242  SIGQUIT  present   servidor-preso
The process left, and left its memory for the autopsy.