Delta XMPP Project

I just threw together some code for handling when a process is requested to terminate. The motive is so I can quit a console application cleanly. With GUI apps, detecting when the user wishes to exit is a trivial task, since any GUI toolkit worth anything will tell you when a window closes (via an ‘X’ button or ALT-F4 or whatever). However, console apps, especially those that run indefinitely, and barring those that have interactive UIs such as curses or prompts, are commonly exited by using Ctrl-C. Fortunately, tracking this kind of event wasn’t too bad to implement. Windows has a handler function specifically for console breaking, and Unix has signals (I trap SIGINT, SIGHUP, and SIGTERM, per the glibc manual).

The JDNS commandline tool has an argument to specify how long it should run, which is just plain silly. And my network interface monitoring test program had a similar option too… Until tonight! Now I can just hit ctrl-C and the app will quit. Clean exits are essential when valgrinding, and so this will make my life much easier.

And now that I’ve thought about it some more, this code may also be useful in GUI apps like Psi, for when a system shutdown occurs. However, I think the Windows code I have is for console only, so that will have to be resolved before it is useful there..