zonem has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I was wondering what the best way was to use Net::FTP to make file transfers in the background (one at a time), from an FTP server. I need to be able to "time out" a transfer after a certain amount of seconds, I don't want to use fork() and waitpid, I think I remember reading somewhere about using eval() and alarm() in combination to manage this. Any ideas? zonem

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Re: background ftp transfers
by mitd (Curate) on Aug 10, 2001 at 02:48 UTC
    Net::Ftp has its own Timeout value available in the constructor Net::FTP->new('somehost.com', Timeout=>...).

    So I don't see the problem with forking.

    mitd-Made in the Dark
    'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'

[reply]
      If I recall; that timeout value only has an effect when connecting to the FTP server; not for transfers.
      Net::FTP will wait for a put or get to either complete or to fail before it returns control back to the script.
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Re: background ftp transfers
by larryk (Friar) on Aug 10, 2001 at 16:08 UTC 
    # from perldoc perlipc

eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm clock restart" };
    alarm 10;
    
    # ftp op here
    
    alarm 0;
};
if ($@ and $@ !~ /alarm clock restart/) { die }

    [download]
    but this won't make it a background task, just interruptable. oh, and if you're on a doze box alarm isn't implemented. 
       larryk                                          
perl -le "s,,reverse killer,e,y,rifle,lycra,,print"
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[d/l]
[select]
      wow; i really should look through the documentation more extensively

      thanks! :)
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