Hi, > My questions are: > > 1. Should alarm() work with a system call like read()? Yes, the signal handler should execute. After that the call should either continue or break with errno=EINTR (I don't remember what was the behaviour of signal() on Linux---better use sigaction() in which case you can control this behaviour). However, it only works if the driver cooperates properly with the kernel. > 2. If not, is there any work-around? Non-blocking I/O, asynchronous I/O, select(), but, again, they must be supported by the driver. If nothing else works, you can read the device in a subprocess and send the data to the main process via pipe (alarm() definitely works when you read() a pipe) or use threads. Andres.
