[erlang-questions] Strange behaviour of exit(kill)

Håkan Huss huss01@REDACTED
Wed Oct 7 09:51:22 CEST 2015


2015-10-07 3:46 GMT+02:00 Robert Virding <rvirding@REDACTED>:

> It's all about signals and not messages. Sending a message to a process
> should *NEVER* by default kill it even if it has the same format as an
> 'EXIT' message. NEVER!. A signal is converted to a message when it arrives
> at a process which is trapping exits unless it is the 'kill' which is
> untrappable and the process always dies.
>
> Yes, but the 'kill' signal is not an exit signal with reason kill. The
'kill' signal can only be sent by calling exit/2 with Reason = kill, which
is documented to have the effect that "an untrappable exit signal is sent
to Pid which will unconditionally exit with exit reason killed." There is
no mention of how the exit reason in that exit signal, and since it is not
trappable there is no way to observe it.


> Explicitly sending the SIGNAL with exit(Pid, kill) should unconditionally
> kill the process
>
Yes.

as should dying with the reason 'kill' in exit(kill) which also sends the
> SIGNAL 'kill'.
>
No, this sends an exit signal with reason kill, but that is not the same
ass the signal sent using exit(Pid, kill).


> In both cases the process receives the SIGNAL 'kill', as shown in my
> example, but in one case it is trappable and in the other it is untrappable.
>
No, in one case it receives an exit signal with reason kill, in the other
case it receives the special untrappable exit signal which causes
unconditional termination.


> My point is that the *same* signal results in different behaviour
> depending on how it was sent. That's incocnsistent.
>
I agree that it is inconsistent. I would have preferred that the exit(Pid,
kill) was a separate function, e.g., kill(Pid) and that exit(Pid, kill)
would be handled as any other exit/2 call. But I won't hold my breath in
anticipation of that being changed...

/Håkan


> Robert
>
>
> On 6 October 2015 at 18:33, zxq9 <zxq9@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 07 October 2015 10:25:38 zxq9 wrote:
>>
>> > or maybe it is that {'EXIT', Pid = self(), kill} *is* specifically
>> untrappable by way of matching on self()?
>>
>> That was too much to hope for:
>>
>> 1> P = spawn(fun Loop() -> receive M -> io:format("Got ~p~n", [M]),
>> Loop() end end).
>> <0.1889.0>
>> 2> P ! {'EXIT', P, kill}.
>> Got {'EXIT',<0.1889.0>,kill}
>> {'EXIT',<0.1889.0>,kill}
>> 3> P ! {'EXIT', P, blam}.
>> Got {'EXIT',<0.1889.0>,blam}
>> {'EXIT',<0.1889.0>,blam}
>> 4> exit(P, kill).
>> true
>> 5> P ! {'EXIT', P, blam}.
>> {'EXIT',<0.1889.0>,blam}
>>
>> If it *did* turn out that matching {'EXIT', self(), kill} was untrappable
>> I would just say "ah, that makes sense -- now I can understand the
>> mechanism behind this without thinking about VM details". Instead it
>> appears to be a case of mysterious activity underlying a message form that
>> is semantically overloaded. And that stinks.
>>
>> -Craig
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