| BUGS |
All these routines create system-specific portability problems. As noted elsewhere, Perl is at the mercy of your C libraries for much of its system behaviour. It's probably safest to assume broken SysV semantics for signals and to stick with simple TCP and UDP socket operations; e.g., don't try to pass open file descriptors over a local UDP datagram socket if you want your code to stand a chance of being portable.
As mentioned in the signals section, because few vendors provide C
libraries that are safely re-entrant, the prudent programmer will do
little else within a handler beyond setting a numeric variable that
already exists; or, if locked into a slow (restarting) system call,
using die() to raise an exception and longjmp(3) out. In fact, even
these may in some cases cause a core dump. It's probably best to avoid
signals except where they are absolutely inevitable. This
will be addressed in a future release of Perl.
| BUGS |