Unfortunately, this is not the way - since I need not only to shut the program down, but to undertake a number of maintainance procedures, that are located in a sub of the server script. Also, the Win32::Process->Wait($timeout) is waiting for the process to shutdown, and if that does not occur for $timeout, then the process is being shut down. And that is absolutely not what is needed :(

Also, alarm does not work on Windows, as far as I recall.