Both of these examples are fine for stuff that doesn't do any calls to system or exec.

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