[dozzie]

There's more than that in SIGHUP. It's sent to the process group owning the terminal[1] (/dev/tty[1-X], /dev/pts/*) when said terminal is closed. Your shell, Midnight Commander, Vim, Emacs, and what not terminates when you close your terminal emulator window.

[1] I don't quite remember what happens to other process groups, since you could have some background jobs stopped.

[misterdata]

Yes, and using the 'nohup' utility you can effectively block the delivery of SIGHUP to a particular process, to ensure it does not terminate when you close your SSH connection.

[jon-wood]

Awesome, I knew nohup could be used for that, but hadn't worked out why it was called that.