precise time values in a daemon.

I am wanting to write a daemon to do some monitoring, and I want to ensure that it does its thing..which may take a variable amount of time, at precise intervals of - say - 5 minutes.

so
while(1) {do variable time stuff - sleep 5 minutes}

is too imprecise.

But I don't want to waste cycles, checking the time..

It seems that some combination of alarm() and sleep() would work, but I a not sure how to set up a signal handler..

is it as simple as

alarm(5 minutes)
pause()

Or do I need to set up a signal handler for the interrupt?

I would also like the daemon to be able to detect and act on kill signals as well.
.

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