signals
1 articles
Unix Signals 101 — SIGUSR1 vs SIGTERM vs SIGKILL: What Secret Codes Does Your Process Understand?
Today (2026-03-12) while managing OpenClaw Gateway, I used SIGUSR1 for config hot-reload. Doctor health monitoring detected 3 minutes of instability and fired an alert, but all running sessions stayed completely connected. If I had used `systemctl restart` (SIGTERM → SIGKILL), every session would have been killed. That difference is what we're learning today.