ualarm (3)
Leading comments
Copyright (c) 2003 Andries Brouwer (aeb@cwi.nl) %%%LICENSE_START(GPLv2+_DOC_FULL) This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The GNU General Public License's references to "object code" and "executables" are to be interpreted as the output of any document formatting or typesetting system, including i...
NAME
ualarm - schedule signal after given number of microsecondsSYNOPSIS
#include <unistd.h> useconds_t ualarm(useconds_t usecs, useconds_t interval);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see feature_test_macros(7)):
ualarm():
-
- Since glibc 2.12:
-
_BSD_SOURCE || (_XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500 || _XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED) && !(_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L || _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 700) - Before glibc 2.12: _BSD_SOURCE || _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500 || _XOPEN_SOURCE && _XOPEN_SOURCE_EXTENDED
DESCRIPTION
The ualarm() function causes the signal SIGALRM to be sent to the invoking process after (not less than) usecs microseconds. The delay may be lengthened slightly by any system activity or by the time spent processing the call or by the granularity of system timers.Unless caught or ignored, the SIGALRM signal will terminate the process.
If the interval argument is nonzero, further SIGALRM signals will be sent every interval microseconds after the first.
RETURN VALUE
This function returns the number of microseconds remaining for any alarm that was previously set, or 0 if no alarm was pending.ERRORS
- EINTR
- Interrupted by a signal.
- EINVAL
- usecs or interval is not smaller than 1000000. (On systems where that is considered an error.)
ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).| Interface | Attribute | Value |
| ualarm() | Thread safety | MT-Safe |
CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001. POSIX.1-2001 marks ualarm() as obsolete. POSIX.1-2008 removes the specification of ualarm(). 4.3BSD, SUSv2, and POSIX do not define any errors.NOTES
POSIX.1-2001 does not specify what happens if the usecs argument is 0. On Linux (and probably most other systems), the effect is to cancel any pending alarm.The type useconds_t is an unsigned integer type capable of holding integers in the range [0,1000000]. On the original BSD implementation, and in glibc before version 2.1, the arguments to ualarm() were instead typed as unsigned int. Programs will be more portable if they never mention useconds_t explicitly.
The interaction of this function with other timer functions such as alarm(2), sleep(3), nanosleep(2), setitimer(2), timer_create(2), timer_delete(2), timer_getoverrun(2), timer_gettime(2), timer_settime(2), usleep(3) is unspecified.
This function is obsolete. Use setitimer(2) or POSIX interval timers (timer_create(2), etc.) instead.