I'm trying to make a IO::Socket::UNIX client connection time out after some time if the server is too slow to respond. I tried using the Timeout argument from IO::Socket but it doesn't appear to work in this case. Here is a server/client example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Socket::UNIX;

use constant SOCKET => 'test_socket.sock';

my $mode = shift or die "Specify a mode\n";

if ($mode eq 'server') {
    my $server = IO::Socket::UNIX->new(
        Type   => SOCK_STREAM,
        Local  => SOCKET,
        Listen => 1,
    ) or die $!;
    while (my $conn = $server->accept()) {
        sleep 5;

        my $name = <$conn>;
        print {$conn} "Hello $name";
        close $conn;
    }
}
elsif ($mode eq 'client') {
    my $client = IO::Socket::UNIX->new(
        Type    => SOCK_STREAM,
        Peer    => SOCKET,
        Timeout => 2,
    ) or die $!;
    print {$client} 'John', "\n";
    print "Got reponse: ", scalar <$client>;
    close $client;
}
else {
    die "Unsupported mode: $mode\n";
}
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The client is set to time out after 2 seconds and the server to take at least 5 seconds to respond. I expected the client to stop after 2 seconds, however it just reads the response after 5 seconds as if the Timeout was completely ignored. Am I doing something wrong?

There is a solution using alarm() in perlipc which works for any kind of blocking code:

my $ALARM_EXCEPTION = "alarm clock restart";
eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die $ALARM_EXCEPTION };
    alarm 10;
    flock(FH, 2)    # blocking write lock
                    || die "cannot flock: $!";
    alarm 0;
};
if ($@ && $@ !~ quotemeta($ALARM_EXCEPTION)) { die }
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However, there is probably a cleaner way to do it. Any ideas? What's the recommended way to make a socket client timeout?

EDIT: Solution

It's possible to use setsockopt to set the read timeout:

use POSIX qw[ ETIMEDOUT EWOULDBLOCK ];
use Socket qw[ SOL_SOCKET SO_RCVTIMEO ];

my $client = IO::Socket::UNIX->new(
    Type => SOCK_STREAM,
    Peer => SOCKET,
) or die $!;
my $timeval = pack 'l!l!,
    2,  # seconds
    0;  # microseconds
$socket->setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET, SO_RCVTIMEO, $timeval) or die $!;

print {$client} "John", "\n";
my $response = <$client>;
die 'Timeout' if !$response and $! == ETIMEDOUT || $! == EWOULDBLOCK;
...
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In order to set a write timeout, replace SO_RCVTIMEO with SO_SNDTIMEO. This is exactly what IO::Socket::Timeout does, I'm leaving a pure solution here for educational purposes, in case someone stumbles upon this thread in the future.