On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Bogart Salzberg <webmas...@inkfist.com> wrote: > Mongers, > > I recently encountered a puzzling dilemma. You might find it interesting, or > obvious (probably not both) and it leads to a question about how perl > handles signals. [...]
perldoc perlipc Search for "Deferred Signals (Safe Signals)". If safe signals are on (the default), then signals are not caught until the current opcode finishes running. Unfortunately this can be forever. For example you can encounter this if you're blocking on I/O and no I/O happens. There are a couple of options available. The simplest being to set the PERL_SIGNALS environment variable to "unsafe". However that is unsafe, and you can dump core. I've generally gone with that approach anyways, though, because I've wanted to do things like force a database connection to Oracle to timeout. Other options include trying to use the :perlio layer (with the default configuration it is the default, but you may have a Perl compiled without it) or to carefully use unbuffered I/O so that you're never blocked in an uninterruptable op-code. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm