Don't try to do this with fork and kill. Instead, take the path suggested in the earlier reply by rbc and use elements of the LWP package. It will take a little more work than the LWP::Simple-based example, but you can set a timeout on the user-agent object before sending the request, which is a better way of handling the 60-second limitation. You aren't doing anything else in that 60 seconds anyway, and trying to do this with fork and kill will mean setting up a $SIG{CHLD} handler, and I doubt you want to get into that mess.

Using the LWP classes is pretty simple:

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request;

$UA = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$UA->timeout(60);

$response = $UA->request(HTTP::Request->new('GET', $url);

# You may now operate on $response->content().
# Be certain you test for success with $response->is_success
[download]

--rjray

Update: I forgot to point out initially another flaw in the fork/kill approach. By running the wget in the child and assigning it to a variable within that child, the parent would not have access to that variable unless you wrote some IPC-management to share the memory between the child and parent processes. In other words, use LWP. You'll soon see why so many of us swear by it.

die "can't fork: $!" unless defined($kidpid = fork());

if ($kidpid) {                      
   # parent sleeps 60 seconds and then kills child
   sleep 60;
   kill("TERM" => $kidpid);        # send SIGTERM to child
} else {                              
   # child does wget
   ...
}
print "$kidpid exitting\n";
exit;
[download]

...
use LWP::Simple; #so you can do a get.
...
die "can't fork: $!" unless defined($kidpid = fork());

if ($kidpid) {                      
   # parent sleeps 60 seconds and then kills child
   sleep 60;
   kill("TERM" => $kidpid);        # send SIGTERM to child
} else {                              
   my $data = get("http://www.example.com/");
   ...
}
[download]

2) If you still wanna to use wget you can do it this way :

    
 eval {
     local $SIG{ALRM} = sub {die "Timeout"};
     alarm 60; #your timeout here
     $resp = `wget ....`
 }
 if ($@) { 
    #something worng
 }
[download]

4) Or ParallelUserAgent module (PUA) if you need fast simult download from several places

One problem with wget (as I have noticed, but maybe I'm doing something wrong ...) is that it somehow doesn't return the right pid to perl, even if you use wget -b

So what I did once was to start wget and then look directly into the process table to find the right pid. Although I was doing this for exactly the opposit reason (I wanted to print a "still downloading" message to the client) it worked quite well.

Anyway, if you found out the PID, you could then use a SIG{ALRM} to issue a kill $PID after 60 seconds

And BTW, I don't think using LWP is the ultimate best solution for downloading stuff. If you want to download not only one page, but a grab a bunch of pages (via spidering, e.g.) wget is definitly easier than LWP. If you use the -p option, wget automatically downloads all additional files needed to render the page, i.e. external style sheets, images, javascript etc. Very handy..

--
#!/usr/bin/perl -w just another perl hacker
print+seek(DATA,$=*.3,@-)?~~<DATA>:$:__DATA__

$ret = `wget --timeout=5`;

-Brett