The GNU C Library - Program Error Signals Go to the first , previous , next , last section, table of contents . The following signals are generated when a serious program error is detected by the operating system or the computer itself. In general, all of these signals are indications that your program is seriously broken in some way, and there's usually no way to continue the computation which encountered the error.
Termination is the sensible ultimate outcome from a program error in most programs.
However, programming systems such as Lisp that can load compiled user programs might need to keep executing even if a user program incurs an error. These programs have handlers which use longjmp to return control to the command level. The default action for all of these signals is to cause the process to terminate. If you block or ignore these signals or establish handlers for them that return normally, your program will probably break horribly when such signals happen, unless they are generated by raise or kill instead of a real error. When one of these program error signals terminates a process, it also writes a core dump file which records the state of the process at the time of termination.