From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!utah-cs!utah-gr!thomas Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: close problem on single-use devices Article-I.D.: utah-gr.518 Posted: Mon Aug 9 09:36:30 1982 Received: Tue Aug 10 02:26:59 1982 References: sri-unix.2563 I've run into this and finally concluded that it was a result of the close routine calling sleep() with an interruptable priority level. If a signal occurs during the sleep, the close is forcibly exited (with a longjump) and any cleanup following the sleep never occurs. On the other hand, if the sleep is called with a non-interuptable priority level, and the awaited event never occurs, there is no way to kill the process. The best solution I can think of is to sleep at a non-interruptable level, but to invoke a timeout routine to terminate the sleep after some reasonable period. Messy, yes, but device interactions always are. =Spencer