psignal() produces a short message on the standard error file describing the indicated signal. First the argument string s is printed, then a colon, then the name of the signal and a NEWLINE. Most usefully, the argument string is the name of the program which incurred the signal. The signal number should be from among those found in <signal.h>.

To simplify variant formatting of signal names, the vector of message strings sys_siglist is provided; the signal number can be used as an index in this table to get the signal name without the newline. The define NSIG defined in <signal.h> is the number of messages provided for in the table; it should be checked because new signals may be added to the system before they are added to the table.

perror(3C), signal(3C)

Use of these interfaces should be restricted to only applications written on BSD platforms. Use of these interfaces with any of the system libraries or in multi-thread applications is unsupported.