But that's probably exactly what he wanted to do.
The quick answer is: Read perlipc and go on from there.

Long answer: working on that ;-)

Update: Here's the long answer:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use POSIX qw/:sys_wait_h/;

my $child_pid = undef;

my $status = fork;
die "failed to fork\n" unless defined $status;

if ($status > 0) {
  # this is the parent process.
  local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { print STDERR "operation timed out for PID $
+status\n"; kill 9, $status };
  alarm 10;
  my $pid = 0;
  do {
    $pid = POSIX::waitpid ($status, POSIX::WNOHANG);
  } until ($pid > 0);
  alarm 0;
} else {
  # this is the child process.
  system "ssh a_server_could_hang";
}
[download]

For any non-portability hit your OS vendor :-(

Kay

Your short answer is correct, but your solution doesn't work on AIX at least. It suffers from the same problem as the normal 'alarm' solution -- the parent dies, but the child (or grandchild in this case) lives on.

The kill doesn't kill the grandchild created by system (even if you use -9 instead of a 9). Also, I'm not sure why you are using an alarm loop around a non-blocking waitpid. It's just going to spin the CPU for 10 seconds. You should either use alarm with a blocking waitpid or just poll/sleep/poll with the non-blocking one.

bluto