A new-to-Perl user on alt.perl asked how to detect an infinite loop, having already been told to use something like setrlimit. Not wanting to scare the person off, I posted the following few lines as a cheap way to abort the Perl program after a timelimit goes off.

Caveats: doesn't work if the program uses eval or sleep, and might not work with retry I/O models. (But beginners aren't likely to use these things!)

BEGIN {
  $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "Infinite loop aborted" };
  alarm 30; # or however long you want before you time out (in seconds
+)
}

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In reply to Poor man's setrlimit by merlyn

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