When does ( alarm(1) == alarm(INFINITY) ) ?

[P. Tucker Withington]

As long as I'm opening myself up to flames...

It just occurred to me that with a simple change to the semantics of pause the
"wakeup waiting" flag could be considered to already be in the kernel:

As I read the manual (I didn't read the code) pause will only return when a
signal is "caught".  If the semantics were that it would also return
(immediately) if there were no signal handlers active (since they revert when
caught), the race condition would also disappear.  Pause could even return a
different error in this case, informing you that there is nothing to pause for
(in the spirit of ECHILD) if you really want to go whole hog.

                               o.o      --tucker
                                ~

(I know, I really should be using 4.2 and I do, but SysV ain't all *that* bad
either.)