signal handling in perl is marginal. and flaky. i either use sigtrap; (the sigtrap pragma,) or if that fails, roll my own. in that case, i always set my handlers recursively, like so:

sub hdl_ALRM
{
  $SIG{ALRM} = \&hdl_ALRM;
  # do stuff here...
}
$SIG{ALRM} = \&hdl_ALRM;
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best of luck!

~Particle ;Þ