I've recently done some fixes in winPR with timers with completion and I've encoutered a case that you may find interesting.

It's about handling EINTR: when a system call in interrupted by an incoming signal, you'll get a -1 return code and errno set to EINTR. So usually when you want to be protected against that behaviour you'll code something like:

#include <sys/select.h>
#include <errno.h>

void myFunction() {
    struct fd_set rset;
    int status, max_fd;

    ...


    do {
        ret = select(max_fd, &rset, NULL, NULL, NULL);
    } while (ret < 0 && errno == EINTR);
}

Ok, so problem treated, you can apply that scheme for any system call and you're done, isn't it ?

The poll case

Unfortunately, this isn't gonna work for some cases. For instance, if you have scheduled a POSIX timer that periodicaly triggers a signal and you're waiting on an unrelated file descriptor. Let's imagine you have a POSIX timer that triggers with SIGALARM every 100 milli-seconds, and you're waiting on another file descriptor fd, but nothing happens on fd. As you wanna be protected against EINTR, you write:

#include <sys/poll.h> 
#include <errno.h>

/* setup POSIX timer with a SIGALARM every 100 ms */

void waitOn(int fd) {
    struct pollfd set;
    int status;

    set.fd = fd;
    set.revents = 0;
    set.events = POLLIN;

    do {
        ret = poll(&set, 1, 1000);
    } while (ret < 0 && errno == EINTR);
}

So instead, of returning after 1 second, you're gonna have an infinite loop. Every 100 milli-second, the POSIX timer will trigger a signal that will be treated, so poll will exit with ret = -1 and errno = EINTR. And you're gonna run that loop forever if nothing happens on fd. The problem happens when the signal is occuring with a shorter delay than the poll wait time. To fix it we should compute a dueDate at the beginning of the function and compute the wait delay at each loop turn (I let you write such code as exercice ;) ).

And what about select ?

Select is a litlle mode subtle, we would have the corresponding code:

#include <sys/select.h>
#include <errno.h>

/* setup POSIX timer with a SIGALARM every 100 ms */

void waitOn(int fd) {
    struct timeval timeout;
    struct fd_set set;
    int status;

    FD_ZERO(&set);
    FD_SET(fd, &set);

    timeout.tv_sec = 1;
    timeout.tv_usec = 0;

    do {
        ret = select(fd+1, &set, NULL, NULL, &timeout);
    } while (ret < 0 && errno == EINTR);
}

Ok, so with a first look it seems like we have the exact same problem ? The select manual states that notably under Linux, the timeout argument may be updated with the remaining sleep delay. So you would not have the infinite loop because timeout would lower until it reaches 0 (so select would return with ret = 0).

But if you want to write some multi-platform code you can't rely on that behaviour, and you'll have to compute the poll delay at each loop turn.

Conclusion

Another possibility is to use pselect or ppoll that will disable signal, but it's not always possible, and it's also not necessarily what you want.