The CERT® C Secure Coding Standard

Glossary

asynchronous-safe

[GNU Pth] A function is asynchronous-safe, or asynchronous-signal-safe, if it can be called safely and without side effects from within a signal handler context. That is, it must be able to be interrupted at any point and to run linearly out of sequence without causing an inconsistent state. It must also function properly when global data might itself be in an inconsistent state. Some asynchronous-safe operations are listed below:

• call the signal() function to reinstall a signal handler

• unconditionally modify a volatile sig_atomic_t variable (as modification to this type is atomic)

• call the _Exit() function to immediately terminate program execution

• invoke an asynchronous-safe function, as specified by your ...