Greetings Monks,

I have a program that goes through about 400 WINNT computers looking for the service pack number. I use a third party program, pstools, to find this info connecting though the Shell module.

My problem is with unsuccessful results. The psinfo program return sucessful results in about 4 seconds but if it can't find, or can't connect to a computer it can take more than a minute. This problem makes my program run longer than I would like

Is there any way, with the shell module (or backticks, qx(), etc), to kill a shell escape if it take more than, say 10 seconds?

use Shell;
use strict;
use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel;

my @computers = qw(big list of computers);
my $workbook = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new("ServicePack.xls");
my $worksheet   = $workbook->addworksheet();
my $rowcount = 0;

for my $computer(@computers){
    $user{'computer'} = $computer;
    $user{'servicepack'} = get_sp($computer);
        $worksheet->write($rowcount, 0, $user{'computer'});
    $worksheet->write($rowcount, 1, $user{'servicepack'});
        $rowcount++;
}

#Function: get_sp
#Arguments:        Computer Name
#Return Value:    Service Pack number
sub get_sp{
    my $cpu = shift @_;
    my $info= psinfo('\\\\'. $cpu); 
    my @lines = split("\n",$info); 
    @lines = grep {/(Service Pack:)/i} @lines;
    s/[\w\s]+:\s+(\d)$/$1/ for @lines; 
    my $servicepack = $lines[0];
    return ($servicepack || "unknown");
}

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In reply to Dealing with timeouts using the Shell module by thunders

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