unexpected alarms

[Henry Spencer]

Blush.  Several people have pointed out that the stuff on page 229 of
Kernighan&Pike does *not* rely on alarms persisting across exec.  My
mistake; I was originally looking around for any sign that the behavior
might be useful, and I looked at the K&P discussion but not at the
code.

Does anybody know of any case where the persistence of alarms across
exec is genuinely useful?  I personally think that just cancelling
them altogether is the right thing to do.  My kernel mod cancels them
only for setuid/gid programs simply because this was the minimum change
in behavior needed to make things safe.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry