Re: alarm(3) bug?

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 01:58:29PM -0700, enh wrote:
> i was trying to replace bionic's hacked alarm.c with the current
> NetBSD alarm.c, but noticed that you return -1 on error, unlike glibc
> and bionic, and apparently contrary to POSIX:
> 
>   http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/alarm.html
> 
> "The alarm() function is always successful, and no return value is
> reserved to indicate an error."

I'd say you have a bigger problem if the system call fails.
The alternative would be silently ignoring the error, which doesn't feel
better.

Joerg