Hi I am new to linux programming. Can anyone tell me the difference between signal and sigaction? I am having an alarm which interrupts a blocking recvfrom call every 10 seconds. When I used signal to specify the function to handle SIGALRM signal, the signal was handled but the recvfrom did not return after the alarm was processed. When I used sigaction, recvfrom call was interrupted and after executing the signal handling function it proceded to the next line in my program. I thought both signal and sigaction could be used interchangably for specifying the signal handling functions. Thanks Sreekumar.