This document is a Mac OS X manual page. Manual pages are a command-line technology for providing documentation. You can view these manual pages locally using the man(1) command. These manual pages come from many different sources, and thus, have a variety of writing styles.

For more information about the manual page format, see the manual page for manpages(5).

Net::Server::SIG(3)                  User Contributed Perl Documentation                 Net::Server::SIG(3)



NAME
       Net::Server::SIG - adpf - Safer signal handling

SYNOPSIS
         use Net::Server::SIG qw(register_sig check_sigs);
         use IO::Select ();
         use POSIX qw(WNOHANG);

         my $select = IO::Select->new();

         register_sig(PIPE => 'IGNORE',
                      HUP  => 'DEFAULT',
                      USR1 => sub { print "I got a SIG $_[0]\n"; },
                      USR2 => sub { print "I got a SIG $_[0]\n"; },
                      CHLD => sub { 1 while (waitpid(-1, WNOHANG) > 0); },
                      );

         ### add some handles to the select
         $select->add(\*STDIN);

         ### loop forever trying to stay alive
         while ( 1 ){

           ### do a timeout to see if any signals got passed us
           ### while we were processing another signal
           my @fh = $select->can_read(10);

           my $key;
           my $val;

           ### this is the handler for safe (fine under unsafe also)
           if( &check_sigs() ){
             # or my @sigs = &check_sigs();
             next unless @fh;
           }

           my $handle = $fh[@fh];

           ### do something with the handle

         }

DESCRIPTION
       Signals in Perl 5 are unsafe.  Some future releases may be able to fix some of this (ie Perl 5.8 or
       6.0), but it would be nice to have some safe, portable signal handling now.  Clarification - much of
       the time, signals are safe enough.  However, if the program employs forking or becomes a daemon which
       can receive many simultaneous signals, then the signal handling of Perl is normally not sufficient
       for the task.

       Using a property of the select() function, Net::Server::SIG attempts to fix the unsafe problem.  If a
       process is blocking on select() any signal will short circuit the select.  Using this concept,
       Net::Server::SIG does the least work possible (changing one bit from 0 to 1).  And depends upon the
       actual processing of the signals to take place immediately after the the select call via the
       "check_sigs" function.  See the example shown above and also see the sigtest.pl script located in the
       examples directory of this distribution.

FUNCTIONS
       "register_sig($SIG => \&code_ref)"
           Takes key/value pairs where the key is the signal name, and the argument is either a code ref, or
           the words 'DEFAULT' or 'IGNORE'.  The function register_sig must be used in conjuction with
           check_sigs, and with a blocking select() function call -- otherwise, you will observe the
           registered signal mysteriously vanish.

       "unregister_sig($SIG)"
           Takes the name of a signal as an argument.  Calls register_sig with a this signal name and
           'DEFAULT' as arguments (same as register_sig(SIG,'DEFAULT')

       "check_sigs()"
           Checks to see if any registered signals have occured.  If so, it will play the registered code
           ref for that signal.  Return value is array containing any SIGNAL names that had occured.

AUTHORS
       Paul T Seamons (paul@seamons.com)

       Rob B Brown (rob@roobik.com) - Provided a sounding board and feedback in creating Net::Server::SIG
       and sigtest.pl.

COPYRIGHT
         Copyright (C) 2001, Paul T Seamons
                             paul@seamons.com
                             http://seamons.com/

         This package may be distributed under the terms of either the
         GNU General Public License
           or the
         Perl Artistic License

         All rights reserved.



perl v5.8.8                                      2001-08-21                              Net::Server::SIG(3)