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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: List of routines safe to use in signals?
Message-ID: <1990Dec16.224246.7644@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 16 Dec 90 22:42:46 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.205957.25208@athena.mit.edu> <995@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au>
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Reply-To: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
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In article <995@usage.csd.unsw.oz.au>, cameron@usage.csd.oz (Cameron Simpson) writes:
|> The thing is that there is often (nay, never) a distinction made in the
|> manual about what is specific to the local implementation and what is
|> generic (generic BSD, generic Sys5, generic ANSI C, etc etc etc). It is
|> often difficult to decide how much of a manual page one should trust when
|> writing code to run on different implementations.

  Agreed.  That is why I mentioned the POSIX standards as well.

  Personally, I would never rely on anything in a man page that I was not
absolutely, positively certain was true of ALL implementations of the function
described in the man page.  That means that I would most likely not assume
that a function is safe to use in a signal handler just because the man page
on one OS type says that it is.  Of course, since I don't recall ever seeing a
man page that actually mentions whether or not a function is safe to use in a
signal handler, the point is sort of moot.  Standards like POSIX may deal with
such things, but I don't think most man pages to :-).

-- 
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