Topic summary
SIGSEGV
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Segmentation fault.
Overview
At the operating system level, this fault is caught and a signal is passed on to the offending process, activating the process's handler for that signal. Different operating systems have different signal names to indicate that a segmentation fault has occurred. On Unix-like operating systems, a signal called SIGSEGV (abbreviated from segmentation violation) is sent to the offending process. On Microsoft Windows, the offending process receives a STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATIONexception.