NAME¶

alarm - set an alarm clock for delivery of a signal

SYNOPSIS¶

#include <unistd.h>

unsigned int alarm(unsigned int seconds);

DESCRIPTION¶

alarm() arranges for a SIGALRM signal to be delivered to the calling process in seconds seconds.

If seconds is zero, any pending alarm is canceled.

In any event any previously set alarm() is canceled.

RETURN VALUE¶

alarm() returns the number of seconds remaining until any previously scheduled alarm was due to be delivered, or zero if there was no previously scheduled alarm.

CONFORMING TO¶

SVr4, POSIX.1-2001, 4.3BSD.

NOTES¶

alarm() and setitimer(2) share the same timer; calls to one will interfere with use of the other.

sleep(3) may be implemented using SIGALRM; mixing calls to alarm() and sleep(3) is a bad idea.

Scheduling delays can, as ever, cause the execution of the process to be delayed by an arbitrary amount of time.

SEE ALSO¶

gettimeofday(2), pause(2), select(2), setitimer(2), sigaction(2), signal(2), sleep(3), time(7)

COLOPHON¶

This page is part of release 3.53 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.