Safe signals. Signals will only be delivered between opcodes. gethostbyaddr is one opcode - Perl defers the querying to the C library, which might go off to the network to perform a query. This may take a long time, and all that time, the signal will be delayed. Only after the result comes back, Perl will deliver the signal.

With the most recent versions of 5.8, one can set an environment variable that gives you back the old behaviour.

Abigail

In reply to Re: SIGALRM and gethostbyaddr by Abigail-II
in thread SIGALRM and gethostbyaddr by jfroebe

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