arping: alarm() vs ualarm()

matthias.hottgenroth at icloud.com matthias.hottgenroth at icloud.com
Thu Apr 7 11:38:48 UTC 2022


Hello all together,

I’m using the busybox arping version to scan a larger number of systems. Lots of these systems don’t answer to the arping request.
Due to the implementation of arping, the timeout has to be at least one second which leads to the fact that the scan duration is artificially extremely lengthened. After looking into the source code, I found out that this is mainly because the function alarm() is used. 
After a simple adjustment of the timeout parameters and changing alarm(1) to ualarm(10000) I have achieved my desired behavior.

Is there reason to use alarm() instead of ualarm() that I’m seeing here?

With kind regards
Matthias


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