This is an awesome thread, especially the 'fart' code and the explanations of it. I recently ran into this "die quietly" issue using the below code. I was getting unwanted "\n"'s inserted that I could not explain. I ended up removing the "die" statement and it works as I want, but I am not sure if I am doing something incorrect (not killing my system command?). This is really my first attempt in using a timed out system command via eval/alarm. Here is my code if you care to review it and give me some feedback.

sub get_size {
 my $disk=$_[0];
 my $size;
 eval {
  local $SIG{ALRM} = sub {
   print_debug("get_size timed out for device $disk");
   die;
  };
  alarm(4);
  $size=qx(bootinfo -s $disk 2>/dev/null);
  alarm(0);
 };
 $size=($size)? $size : "unknown";
 chomp $size;
 return $size;
}
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