Re: Handling Unix signals in a GTK+ application

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Saturday 11 March 2006 22:36, Thomas Okken wrote:
> > [Using a pipe] is generally the best way of dealing
> > with asynchronous (Unix) signals, but for simple
> > cases another approach is just to set a flag of type
> > volatile sig_atomic_t in the Unix signal handler,
> > and then check and act on the status of the flag in
> > the glib event loop with an idle handler set up with
> > g_idle_add().
>
> The downside of that approach is that you have to
> busy-wait on that flag, while the pipe approach allows
> the application to be completely idle (and still have
> fast response to the signal)... I went with the pipe
> approach; using the sample code referred to by another
> poster, it turned out to be pretty easy.

That's not right.  Idle handlers do not busy wait.  They do trigger 
invocations of the event loop at indeterminate intervals.  They are also very 
common (if you don't want to communicate with the glib event loop from other 
threads with a pipe, you are likely to end up with using a GAsyncQueue object 
and an idle handler).

Chris