File descriptors and file descriptions are not the same thing. Descriptors are references to descriptions, along with some metadata, and multiple descriptors can point to the same description.
The rationale was discussed in-depth earlier on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/). Signals are useful as a software analogue to hardware interrupts, even though they are probably too low-level for most application…
File descriptors and file descriptions are not the same thing. Descriptors are references to descriptions, along with some metadata, and multiple descriptors can point to the same description.
The rationale was discussed in-depth earlier on LWN (https://lwn.net/Articles/982186/). Signals are useful as a software analogue to hardware interrupts, even though they are probably too low-level for most application…