But alarm sends a signal to the process that called alarm, not the child process, right? Even if it sent it to the child, the child process would need a signal handler for that process.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my question. The child process is not a single script, but can be a variety of scripts, and may not even be Perl. I don't want to require the child scripts be modified. Well, that was the approach I was pushing for, but my question was pertaining to changing only the parent script. How can a threaded Perl script run any system command, capture that command's output, and kill it if it runs for too long?

In reply to Re^2: non-blocking backticks by chris212
in thread non-blocking backticks by chris212

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