If you don't know about it, sure, but I find it's kind of convenient to get a safe shutdown and then be able to easily say "I don't care, just stop this program" without needing a separate kill -9 command or something.
Kids these day. Try resetting server windows on a sgi.
Subject: -42- How can I restart the X server?
Date: 10 Sep 1995 00:00:01 EST
To restart the X server (Xsgi) once, do any one of the following
(in increasing order of brutality):
- killall -TERM Xsgi
- hold down the left-Control, left-Shift, F12 and keypad slash keys
(this is fondly known as the "Vulcan Death Grip")
- /usr/gfx/stopgfx; /usr/gfx/startgfx
- reboot
To restart the X server every time someone logs out of the console,
edit /var/X11/xdm/xdm-config, change the setting of
"DisplayManager._0.terminateServer" from "False" to "True" and do
'killall -HUP xdm'.
As I wrote, Ctrl-\ should do the trick. And itβs just not practical having to know which program applies the double pattern, and having to train yourself to not accidentally hit Ctrl-C twice.
My brush with the double-ctrl-C pattern was in a place that wrote a lot of Java. It was generally frowned on to write any code that relied on signals which windows users can't send, and if I recall, Java made it quite difficult anyhow.
Windows does have a tradition of using ctrl-c to quit though, so SIGINT ends up being one of the few that you can use in both places. It's not pretty, but giving it a different meaning based on how many times you've ordered it seems like a somewhat natural next step, if a hacky one.
