On POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

-compliant platforms, SIGXFSZ is the signal

Signal (computing)

A signal is a limited form of inter-process communication used in Unix, Unix-like, and other POSIX-compliant operating systems. Essentially it is an asynchronous notification sent to a process in order to notify it of an event that occurred. When a signal is sent to a process, the operating system...

 sent to a process

Process (computing)

In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its current activity. Depending on the operating system , a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.A computer program is a...

 when it grows a file larger than the maximum allowed size. In source code, SIGXFSZ is a symbolic constant

C preprocessor

The C preprocessor is the preprocessor for the C and C++ computer programming languages. The preprocessor handles directives for source file inclusion , macro definitions , and conditional inclusion ....

 defined in the header file

Header file

Some programming languages use header files. These files allow programmers to separate certain elements of a program's source code into reusable files. Header files commonly contain forward declarations of classes, subroutines, variables, and other identifiers...

 signal.h

Signal.h

signal.h is a header file defined in the C Standard Library to specify how a program handles signals while it executes. A signal can report some exceptional behavior within the program , or a signal can report some asynchronous event outside the program .A signal can be generated...

. Symbolic signal names are used because a signal's designated number can vary across platforms.

Etymology

SIG is a common prefix for signal names. XFSZ is an abbreviation for exceeded file size.

Usage

SIGXFSZ is sent to a process when it causes a file to grow larger than the maximum allowed size, as determined by the ulimit system call

System call

In computing, a system call is how a program requests a service from an operating system's kernel. This may include hardware related services , creating and executing new processes, and communicating with integral kernel services...

 and shell builtin

Shell builtin

In computing, a shell builtin is a command or a function, called from a shell, that is executed directly in the shell itself, instead of an external executable program which the shell would load and execute....

.