I'm on a Debian box as well, and the behaviour is like this:

• Your original code doesn't print anything because the program finishes before the timer rings. That's quite normal.
• With Corion's example, I get the print - but not the full sleep time, the code immediately resumes after the alarm. I didn't know that, but the alarm documentation gives a hint: It is usually a mistake to intermix "alarm" and "sleep" calls, because "sleep" may be internally implemented on your system with "alarm".

If your C library's print function isn't re-entrant (many aren't), then there's always a chance that weird things happen when the signal goes off while your code is printing something.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.