Catching Signals

An article by Glen    No Comments

Ever wanted to catch O/S Interrupts in your Java code? Things like CTRL-C on Windows or various SIGs on your fave brand of Unix. Well it turns out you can!



A friend from work tipped me off to a feature introduced in JDK 1.3 where you can call Runtime.addShutdownHook(Thread yourHook). You pass in the thread unstarted, and when the VM gets a shutdown signal, it’ll start your thread.

		Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();

		rt.addShutdownHook(new Thread() {

			public void run() {

				System.out.println("Ah-ha! You killed it!");

				System.out.flush();

			}

		});

Neat, huh! For more info check out http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/lang/enhancements.html#hooks