sigwait - differences between Linux & FreeBSD

[Matthias Andree]

Am 09.10.2009, 03:38 Uhr, schrieb Stephen Hocking  
<stephen.hocking at gmail.com>:

> It appears as if the documentation does not match up with the reality
> in Linux's case. That's what the empirical evidence suggests anyway.
> The code does does a waitpid after receiving the SIGCHLD to determine
> what child process has exited and then searches its list of sessions
> looking for that particular pid, so as to tidy up.

My reception is: if the process wants SIGCHLD, it will have to install its  
own handler, because the default disposition for this signal is SIG_IGN (=  
discard signal and do not turn child process into a zombie).

So use your patch for FreeBSD, feed it to the upstream maintainer with a  
copy of this thread and relevant quotes from the standard and manpage and  
move on. :)

The alternative is to do away with SIGCHLD and use waitpid((pid_t)-1,  
WNOHANG) to poll for children that have exited.

> I can to some degree understand that implementation of sigwait, as if
> you state your intention to wait for a particular signal, that means
> that you don't wish to ignore it.

That's outside the standard. If it works on a particular Linux kernel  
version that doesn't mean it will work on every other. Why lose yourself  
in empirical programming if there are standards?

-- 
Matthias Andree