At 2:24 PM -0500 5/29/02, David M. Lloyd wrote: >But in that case I agree with Dan's >analysis that flags should be used for signal handling just because >writing portable signal handling code that does much more (in a >potentially threaded environment) than that is very complicated.
Right, this is a lesson we learned (well, I assume we learned it) with perl 5. The actual signal handler itself can't assume that any structures external to itself are coherent. Avoiding blocking system calls should help us out a lot here, since the single biggest reason to have actual code in a signal handler (as opposed to execting the code later on in a pseudo-signal handler) is for alarm interrupting syscalls. And if we don't do that, well, we should be far more OK. -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk