(no subject)

[Carlos Pereira <carlos pehoe civil ist utl pt>]

> Of course the user can still kill -9, and your app can still crash, 
> so you probably don't want to depend on disabling Ctrl-C.

I think it depends of the specific situation,
in most cases, disabling ctrC can be seen as a
very user-unfriendly choice, but sometimes it 
might the best option:

- If the application is going to handle a
sensible file, it makes sense to disable
ctrC before and enabling it again as soon as
the operation is completed. This might help to
avoid data corruption, if the user did ctrC,
by acident or without thinking. Of course the user 
can still kill the program with kill -9 but then 
it is her/his responsability. Usually people don't 
do kill -9 by accident but indeed they do ctrC.

- If the program is, say a CAD application, where
the user is building some complex piece, or even a text
editor, if he/she does a ctrC, important data might 
be lost if the user didn't save it before...
(for example XEmacs doesn't accept ctrC, at
least in my system)

On the other hand, if the program crashes when ctrC is
disabled, say with a forever loop, then the user can 
always do a kill -9 to stop execution. I accept that if
a program freezes most mainstream users don't know the
kill -9 command but probably they don't know ctrC either...

Carlos