The most frequent request is to move the TclX signal handling commands into Tcl. This page is to formalise that desire, leading to a TIP. There is some discussion/question as to the wisdom of doing this in TclX Future.

The TclX commands falling into this category are:

alarm
signal
kill
wait
sleep

Of closely-related interest:

execl
fork

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LV Why is execl and fork in this list? They really are not related to signaling - more to posix.

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It should also be pointed out that signals are actually talked about in the C standard, so really they are not strictly bound to POSIX. --Setok

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Note that there is a large limitation with Tcl_AsyncMark on UNIX where the notifier will not wake if idle due to a brain-dead implementation of Tcl_AlertNotifier. See Bug #502022 or Bug #502193. Once this is resolved, signals should work well. -- DG

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DKF: Alas, fork doesn't work with Threads due to issues with the pthread library. (The one I can remember is that locks are in an unknown state in the child process.) We should consider whether we should produce an equivalent of tclsvc for Unix that does a full disconnect (double-fork() and all) before processing any Tcl scripts so that the second-most important aspect is handled (the standard exec command is the most important one and isn't affected by the POSIX thread issues because it avoids the nasty parts).

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