One question about "sigaction.sa_handler"

[Tellalca]

Hey;

I am currently busy with multiprocessing and multithreading. There I saw a signal SIGCHLD which is an excellent zombie process cleaner by handling that signal.

But when we are writing our handler function why we declaring it with an signal number arguement ? Is this arguement is automatically passed by sigaction() function ? Here below is the code

void ZombieHandler(int signal_num) // why is signal_num needed? Is it passed implicitly by sigaction() function ?
{
	int status;
	wait(&status);	// clean up the ended process and save the status
	child_exit_status = status;
}
int main(int argc, char** args)
{
	struct sigaction sigchild_action;
	memset(&sigchild_action, 0, sizeof sigchild_action);
	sigchild_action.sa_handler = &ZombieHandler;
	sigaction(SIGCHLD, &sa, NULL);

	/*Do things, create child processes
	// and they will be handled securely*/
	return 0;
}

Thanks!

[nezachem]

The argument is passed by the OS when the signal is delivered. The rationale is that you may install the same handler for different signals.