Interruptterminate

Interruptterminate is a concept used to describe a two-phase shutdown approach for running tasks or processes: first interrupt, then terminate. In this framing, an interrupt signals a task to halt normal operation and prepare for shutdown, while termination completes the process by releasing resources, saving state if needed, and exiting in a controlled manner. The term itself is not a standard official label in major operating systems, but the idea appears in discussions of graceful shutdowns, fault handling, and concurrent programming patterns.

In practice, the interrupt phase is typically asynchronous and aimed at stopping ongoing work or yielding control to a cleanup sequence. The termination phase is a definitive end state in which the task stops executing and all acquired resources—memory, file handles, network connections—are released. This separation helps to minimize data loss and ensure consistent cleanup, but it requires careful design to avoid races or partially completed operations.

Examples and related concepts include the use of signals in Unix-like systems, where SIGINT represents an interrupt and SIGTERM represents a termination request, with SIGKILL used for forceful termination. Programming models often implement similar behavior through cancellation tokens or exception handling, allowing a task to respond to an interrupt, perform necessary cleanup, and then exit.

Key considerations for interruptterminate implementations include ensuring data integrity, making cleanup idempotent, handling partially completed work safely, and providing predictable shutdown behavior under fault conditions. See also: signals, cancellation, graceful shutdown, and fault-tolerant design.