[TUHS] Sleep()y musings

[Dave Horsfall]

Back when the dinosaurs were using card readers (and yes, I've used a card 
reader on Unix; I think it was a desktop CDC model, and the driver would 
handle two modes: strict 80-column i.e. one 12-bit column per 16-bit word 
and you got 80 of 'em on a DMA channel, or ASCII NL-terminated after last 
non-blank column, and no, I have no idea whether it handled EBCDIC or CDC 
etc, but I digress as usual).

Where was I?  Oh yes, sleeps...

Back when sleep(3) was sleep(2) (yes, Virginia, sleep() used to be a 
system call, then it became alarm()/pause(), and now it seems to be 
nanosleep(), and I'm wandering again), you never called sleep(1) because 
its granularity was +/-1 second (and all the way up to +infinity, 
actually, on a really busy machine), thus it could return right away, with 
ensuing hilarity.

So, I'm curious:

When did sleep(2) become sleep(3)?  Was it V7, or some BSD?  Or Babbage 
help me, SysVile?

When did the caveat about sleeping for 1 second become known?  I don't 
think that I ever saw it documented, but was one of those "lore" things 
passed around at Unix conferences and the like.

And when did it start using nanosleep() instead of alarm()/pause()?  I see 
that my Penguin box has a bet both ways; it "may" use SIGALRM[a] (thus 
"mixing calls to alarm(2) and sleep() is a bad idea" (well, I've used 
both), and also refers to nanosleep().

[a]
Alpine's spell-checker suggested "SICKROOM" here; pretty close when 
dealing with timed-out reads on a TTY connection[ii] :-)

[ii]
Have you tried this with Perl?  You can't rely on EINTR[3], so you have to 
use eval{} blocks instead, and it starts getting pretty fugly...

[3]
And here it suggested "ENTREE".

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."