NAME
alarm - set an alarm clock for delivery of a signal SYNOPSIS
#include
unsigned int alarm(unsigned int seconds); DESCRIPTION alarm() arranges for a SIGALRM signal to be delivered to the calling process in seconds seconds. If seconds is zero, any pending alarm is canceled. In any event any previously set alarm() is canceled. RETURN VALUE alarm() returns the number of seconds remaining until any previously scheduled alarm was due to be delivered, or zero if there was no previ‐ ously scheduled alarm. CONFORMING TO SVr4, POSIX.1-2001, 4.3BSD. NOTES alarm() and setitimer(2) share the same timer; calls to one will inter‐ fere with use of the other. sleep(3) may be implemented using SIGALRM; mixing calls to alarm() and sleep(3) is a bad idea. Scheduling delays can, as ever, cause the execution of the process to be delayed by an arbitrary amount of time. SEE ALSO gettimeofday(2), pause(2), select(2), setitimer(2), sigaction(2), sig‐ nal(2), sleep(3), time(7) COLOPHON
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Linux 2013-04-18 ALARM(2)