Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!richard
From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: signals
Message-ID: <225@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Mar 89 16:13:36 GMT
Reply-To: richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 20

Does Unix make any guarantees about when a signal will be delivered?  The
man page for kill doesn't say anything about this in any of the versions
at my disposal.

In particular, if a process sends itself a signal, will it be handled
before the kill system call returns?

Looking at the man page actually confused me further.  My manuals for
4.1BSD, 4.2BSD and SunOS4.0 claim that kill(0, sig) sends sig to all
*other* processes in the process group (SunOS4.0 is particularly
explicit about this).  4.3BSD and SunOS 3.2 just say all processes in
the process group.  Presumably the latter description is the correct
one for all these systems?  (Sixth edition refers to "all other
processes which have the same controlling typewriter".)

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin,                         JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,             ARPA:  R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.                  UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin