If you've written any amount of bash code, you've likely come across the trap command. Trap allows you to catch signals and execute code when they occur. Signals are asynchronous notifications that are sent to your script when certain events occur. Most of these notifications are for events that you hope never happen, such as an invalid memory access or a bad system call. However, there are one or two events that you might reasonably want to deal with. There are also "user" events available that are never generated by the system that you can generate to signal your script. Bash also provides a psuedo-signal called "EXIT", which is executed when your script exits; this can be used to make sure that your script executes some cleanup on exit.