In article <Pine.NEB.4.02.9901061944590.5814-100000@miyu.feyrer.net> feyrer@rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de (Hubert Feyrer) writes:
>
>According to the manpage, alarm(3) has an unsigned int as argument, but
>the same manpages states that the maximim number of seconds allowed is
>2147483647 which sounds like a signed int. Why?

Because it is implemented on top of setitimer(2) which uses 
struct itimerval -> struct timeval -> tv_sec. tv_sec is defined
to be long in <sys/time.h>, and in 32 bit machines the limit is
0x7fffffff, which is 2147483647.

christos