Code like below used to help me to cope with timeouts for blocking IO on Windows. Of course introducing threads may be undesirable or totally unusable for your purposes, i.e. not sure if it's worth anything.

use strict;
use warnings;
use threads;
use threads::shared;

my $err :shared = '';
 
sub timed_action (&$;@) {
    my ( $code, $timeout, @args ) = @_;

    local $SIG{ TERM } = sub { threads-> exit };
    lock( $err = '' );
 
    my $t = async {
        { lock $err }
        my $result = eval { $code-> ( @args )};
        lock( $err = $@ );
        cond_signal $err;
        return $result
    };
    if ( !cond_timedwait $err, time + $timeout ) {
        $err = 'Timeout!!!';
        $t-> kill( 'TERM' );
    }
    if ( $err ) {
        print "$err\n";
        $t-> detach;
        return undef
    }
    return $t-> join;
}

# let's test it

use LWP::Simple;
timed_action { get 'http://10.255.255.1' or die } 3;
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