Doing anything complicated in a signal handler is scary dangerous. The most common problem lies in memory management -- if your code attempts to malloc() a buffer when the main code is already in malloc(), your heap can get corrupted. It won't happen all the time, and it may not even happen often, but it can happen and it's very hard to debug.

The Signals section in Chapter 16 (IPC) of the Camel explains the rationale for this further -- but the general rule of thumb is that your handler shouldn't do anything more complicated than updating a variable, e.g. 

   my $interrupted = 0;
   $SIG{ALRM} = sub { $interrupted = 1; };

[download]

In reply to Re^3: System call + signals = bad return code? by papidave
in thread System call + signals = bad return code? by swkronenfeld

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.