Question

I am writing a Perl script and I need to execute Unix Ctrl+Z on the script.
How can I do it in Perl ?

thanks.

Answer 1

From perl you can send signals to processes with the function kill, which has the same name as the Unix command line tool that does the same thing. The equivalent to Ctrl+Z is running

kill -SIGTSTP pid

you need to find out what numeric value your TSTP signal has on your system. You would do this by running

kill -l TSTP

on the command line. Let’s say this returns 20

Then in your Perl script you would add

kill 20 => $$;

which will send the TSTP signal to the currently running process id ($$)

Update:
as described by daxim, you can skip the ‘kill -l’ part and provide the name of the signal directly:

kill 'TSTP' => $$;