DESCRIPTION

     prctl is called with a first argument describing what to  do
     (with values defined in <linux/prctl.h>), and further param-
     eters with a significance depending on the  first  one.   At
     present  the  only option value defined is PR_SET_PDEATHSIG,
     and the corresponding call sets  the  parent  process  death
     signal of the current process to arg2 (either a signal value
     in the range 1..maxsig, or 0 to clear).  This is the  signal
     that the current process will get when its parent dies. This
     value is cleared upon a fork().

RETURN VALUE

     On success, zero is returned.  On error, -1 is returned, and
     errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

     EINVAL
          The value  of  option  is  not  recognized,  or  it  is
          PR_SET_PDEATHSIG  and  arg2  is  not  zero  or a signal
          number.

CONFORMING TO

     This call is Linux-specific.  IRIX has a ptctl  system  call
     (also  introduced  in Linux 2.1.44 as irix_prctl on the MIPS
     architecture), with prototype

     ptrdiff_t prctl(int option, int arg2, int arg3

     and options to get the maximum number of processes per user,
     get the maximum number of processors the calling process can
     use, find out  whether  a  specified  process  is  currently
     blocked, get or set the maximum stack size, etc., etc.

AVAILABILITY

     The ptctl()  systemcall  was  introduced  in  Linux  2.1.57.
     There is no ptctl() library call as yet.

SEE ALSO

     signal(2)