The default behavior of $SIG{INT}, the keyboard interrupt, is determined by the OS. On *nixen it is the system's process termination function, exit(), and you can probably rely on a system doing its own version of that if signals exist at all. The *nix behavior is POSIX standard.

Perl does not set its own handler, so anything that leaves $SIG{INT} undefined will work.

{
    local $SIG{INT};
}
[download]

{
    undef local $SIG{INT};
}
[download]

After Compline,
Zaxo

or maybe [for self-documentation - thanks to broquaint for asking]

{
    undef local $SIG{INT};
}
[download]

will do.

Yuck. Please don't advice people to write this kind of junk. Rather, teach them about Perl's default behaviour: if you localize a scalar variable, it gets the value undef — unless you assign something to it. So

    local $foo;
[download]

should be self-documenting enough. (If it isn't: learn Perl!) But not this... perversion.

Did you not read the part "or maybe [for self-documentation -"?

undef local $SIG{INT} is clearer in intention than local $SIG{INT}. Reading other's code I might question if it was a piece of kruft (lavaflow, whatever there calling it now)

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."

A more portable solution would be, to remember the value of $SIG{INT} before you set it to 'IGNORE', and restore the old value whenever you want it.

That's precisely what local() is for.

Over the years, people are so wrapped in the discussions of local vs. my, that they tend to forget what a great concept local really is. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on lexical scalars.

my $foo;
{
    local $foo;
}
[download]

  Can't localize lexical variable $foo at ...
[download]

Oddly enough, it does work on individual hash and array elements, even when those hashes and arrays are lexicals!

my %hash = (a => 'one', b => 'two', c => 'three' );
use Data::Dumper;
{
    local $hash{b} = 'Hello!';
    print Dumper \%hash;
}
print Dumper \%hash;
[download]

Unfortunately, if a localised hash element didn't exist in the outer scope, then when it's restored, it is merely set to undef, not deleted. So you end up with one hash element more than you had before. You can localise the entire hash — if it isn't a lexical, that is; but still...