Can signals be considered a form of inter-process communication?

Yes, signals can be considered a form of inter-process communication (IPC), although they have their own characteristics. Signals are asynchronous notifications that the operating system sends to a process to inform it about events (for example, interruption, termination of a child process, timeout).

Signals allow processes to respond to external events or interact with each other, for example, by sending a SIGTERM signal to request process termination.

However, signals are limited in the amount of information they can transmit (usually only the signal code), so for more complex data exchange, other IPC mechanisms are used: sockets, pipes, shared memory, etc.