nested alarm signals (fwd)

[Eugene Tsyrklevich]

~sdpm~
> > Even if there was such a rule for a single process, it
> > seems odd to me that the child process for alarm_die.pl would be
> > affected by the fact that it was run from within an alarm signal
> > handler.
> 
> There are a large number of system calls that are unsafe to make while
> inside a signal handler.  Any attempt to call these may result in
> incorrect, undefined, or otherwise disastrous behavior.  I was looking
> for a complete list, but failed to find one.  However, I'm certain that
> among them are: fork, exec, read, and write.


POSIX.1 requires all of the above functions to be reentrant. Thus you can use them in your signal handlers.
see 'Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment' page 278


Also check out
http://www.perl.com/pub/doc/manual/html/pod/perlfunc/alarm.html


cheers.
~sdpm~

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