Understanding output of program

Question

I was looking at this stack exchange question: how to call a function automatically at regular intervals?

And I tried running the code in the first answer

#include <signal.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/time.h>

void timer_handler (int signum)
{
 static int count = 0;
 printf ("timer expired %d times\n", ++count);
}

int main ()
{
 struct sigaction sa;
 struct itimerval timer;

 /* Install timer_handler as the signal handler for SIGVTALRM. */
 memset (&sa, 0, sizeof (sa));
 sa.sa_handler = &timer_handler;
 sigaction (SIGVTALRM, &sa, NULL);

 /* Configure the timer to expire after 250 msec... */
 timer.it_value.tv_sec = 0;
 timer.it_value.tv_usec = 250000;
 /* ... and every 250 msec after that. */
 timer.it_interval.tv_sec = 0;
 timer.it_interval.tv_usec = 250000;
 /* Start a virtual timer. It counts down whenever this process is
   executing. */
 setitimer (ITIMER_REAL, &timer, NULL);

 /* Do busy work. */
 while (1);
}

I don't understand what it is doing. It appears to print "Alarm Clock" after 2500 milliseconds, but I don't understand how that's possible since there is no print statement to that effect. How do I get it to increment the counter every 2500 milliseconds like its supposed to?

Answer 1

ITIMER_REAL sends SIGALRM not SIGVTALRM . Change the signal and it'll work.

#include <signal.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <sys/time.h>

void timer_handler (int signum)
{
 static int count = 0;
 printf ("timer expired %d times\n", ++count);
}

int main ()
{
 struct sigaction sa;
 struct itimerval timer;

 /* Install timer_handler as the signal handler for SIGVTALRM. */
 memset (&sa, 0, sizeof (sa));
 sa.sa_handler = &timer_handler;
 sigaction (SIGALRM, &sa, NULL);

 /* Configure the timer to expire after 250 msec... */
 timer.it_value.tv_sec = 0;
 timer.it_value.tv_usec = 250000;
 /* ... and every 250 msec after that. */
 timer.it_interval.tv_sec = 0;
 timer.it_interval.tv_usec = 250000;
 /* Start a virtual timer. It counts down whenever this process is
   executing. */
 setitimer (ITIMER_REAL, &timer, NULL);

 /* Do busy work. */
 while (1);
}

(Generally, it's a bad idea to printf in a signal handler since printf isn't async-signal safe, but in your case it shouldn't be dangerous, because you're interrupting regular-context code that is async-signal safe (namely the busy loop). POSIX doesn't appear to guarantee this special exception, though, so to be perfectly safe, you should refrain from making any async-signal unsafe calls in signal handlers and replace the printf with a write(1, ...) .)