Re: [PATCH] Replacement for the sigs_to_ignore hack in timeout.c

[Bruno Haible]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> [reviving an old thread...]

This was a reply to
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2008-10/msg00216.html>,
for those who - like me - lost the context after 4 months.

> I confirmed that running with SIGCHLD ignored, and regardless
> of which wait function it uses (wait, waitpid, or waitid), the
> parent still fails to determine the child's exit status.  I.e.,
> each of the wait functions does wait, but then returns -1/ECHILD
> rather than the child's PID.

That's as expected, according to POSIX
(<http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/V2_chap02.html#tag_15_04_03>
section SIG_IGN).

> Which makes me think gnulib's wait-process.c will have to be changed
> to deal with this.

wait-process.c is meant to react depending on the exit code of the child
process. So the change I could apply is to add a comment in the specification:
"This function assumes that the signal handler for SIGCHLD is not set to
SIG_IGN."

Do you have something else in mind?

Bruno