I don't know nothing about thread-programming in perl, but using fork I used a scheme like the folling:

eval {
        local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "Timed Out!\n" };
        my $timeout = 30; # give 30 seconds to accept and process data

        my $previous_alarm = alarm($timeout);
        
        # get input
        # and do heavy and interesting and cool stuff :-)
        # ...
        # finished with this

        alarm($previous_alarm)
}; # eval
if ($@ =~ /timed out/i) {
    # check stuff, report error, etc
}
[download]

hth

regards,
tomte

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Edit:Fixed indentation.