Why does select() change the timeout (last argument)?

I found three reasons why that shouldn't happen:
- The remaining time can easily be obtained by calling gettimeofday().
- This breaks the RPC code in the C library because when a remote
  portmapper doesn't reply, the modified timeout is used again. 
  This causes a packet storm which will persist until the program in
  question is killed. This is a good way to really mess up the IP
  stack of certain systems (I reliably could get an A/UX box, which is
  where the remote portmapper is located at, to effectively turn off
  its entire TCP/IP subsystem) but not good behavior.
- I checked the manpages of Ultrix and SunOS. Neither says that the
  timeout argument is changed.

I don't know yet why the remote portmapper didn't respond in the
first place -- pinging the Linux system from the remote side worked,
which seems to indicate that the Ethernet part is working correctly. 
Gonna hack a packet dumper into the Ethernet driver now.

-- 
Love someone. Anyone.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/