Hello Gergely, [Best to CC linux-man on man-pages comments and bug reports; CC added] On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 1:31 AM, Gergely Soos <sogerc1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Greetings, > > I have a suggestion for the manpage of sigaction(2): It should state that a > signal can be blocked and the list of blocked signals is inherited from the > parent process. > It would have saved me hours of struggling if it did state it. ( > http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170418 ) My response to your bug report is multi-levelled ;-). 0. Since sigaction(2)'s purpose is primarily about setting signal dispositions, that page is not really the right place for describing the samantics of the signal mask with respect to fork(), or to explain that a signal can be blocked. 1. These (rather fundamental) facts are already covered in signal(7), which provides an overview of signals and attempts to point the reader to all of the other relevant man page sfor each topic, and sigprocmask(), which describes the details of how to block a signal. 2. This raises the question: why didn't you read signal(7)? It is listed in the SEE ALSO section at the bottom of the page, and also in a couple of other places in the page. 3. Answering my own question: perhaps (probably!) the sigaction(2) man page just isn't explicit enough about referring the reader to signal(7). So I added a sentence to the very first paragraph to explicitly refer the reader to signal(7). 4. Your report actually prompted me to go through various signal-related pages to see how well they describe the semantics with respect to fork() and execve(). Among other things I now added text to signal(7) describing the semantics with respect to fork() and execve() for signal dispositions, signal mask, and pending signals. Here's a summary (full details via git) of today's changes that I made after your report: signal.7: describe semantics w.r.t. fork() and execve() sigaction.2: refer reader to signal(7) for an overview of signals sigaction.2: explain semantics of signal disposition during fork() and execve() sigwaitinfo.2: distinguish per-thread and process-wide signals sigwaitinfo.2: these interfaces have per-thread semantics sigaltstack.2: explain inheritance of alternate signal stack across fork(2) sigpending.2: explain effect of fork() and execve() for pending signal set sigpending.2: explain how thread's pending signal set is defined sigprocmask.2: explain effects of fork() and execve() for signal mask sigaction.2: refer to signal(7) for more details on signal mask. All of these changes will be in man-pages-3.11, and are already available via git. Thanks for your report! Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
