The -hei switch causes a BASIC error #250 to be generated immediately upon receipt of the SIGHUP (hangup) signal. The typical reason for receiving this signal is that the modem or telnet connection has been dropped, although it could also have been sent manually by another process using the kill command. The error will either cause your program to go to its trap routine, or if there is no trap routine active, to abort to the A-Shell command prompt. In either case, if the process doesn’t exit, A-Shell will terminate itself as soon as it stops to wait for terminal input. The idea here is to allow the process time to do any program-controlled housecleaning that it cares to do, before being forcefully terminated. Note that -hei may be used in conjunction with -hetcki.

If none of the –h* switches are specified, the default response to receipt of the SIGHUP signal is for the A-Shell process to become a background daemon but otherwise keep running normally, until such time as it stops to wait for keyboard input. Then, it will get the error #250, just as if –hei had been specified.