A related wish I have is that a Haskell program receiving a HUP signal should flush its buffers before terminating.
Or even better, flush on some other signal that does not terminate the program.
Well, you can catch HUP in the program and initiate a flush. Actually just doing System.exitWith will cause all the open handles to be flushed and closed, but note that if you do System.exitWith from a signal handler it won't terminate the program any more... ;-) I think we've just found an argument in favour of having System.exitWith always terminate the program even from a child thread. If you want to *just* flush all the open handles from a signal handler, you'll need to keep track of the open handles and flush them by hand from the signal handler. See the Posix library documentation for details on setting up a signal handler. Cheers, Simon