I have a simple perl script that calls a shell script which for whatever reason "hangs". I want to simply force a time out after 20 seconds. I did a lot of research and was brought to perl Alarms. It works when I test with sleep(), but when running the shell script the alarm doesn't kick in. Can someone please help???? Here is my code. Thanks in Advance.

#!/bin/perl 
 
use strict; 
use warnings; 
 
use CGI; 
 
my $q = new CGI; 
 
print $q->header; 
 
eval { 
   local %SIG; 
   $SIG{ALRM}= 
     sub{ die "timeout reached, after 20 seconds!\n"; }; 
   alarm 20; 
    
   #sleep (60); 
   system("/opt/bea/domain/fsa/scripts/start.sh"); 
 
   alarm 0; 
}; 
 
alarm 0; 
 
if($@) { print "Error: $@\n"; } 
 
exit(0);
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