Well in fairness my original question wasn't why "won't alarm work", this thread has just gone that way so I've addressed the suggestions given.

It's hard to provide more detail than I already have...

The program I'm struggling in is rather big, here it is again but with the WMI server probing line included and sql queries changed for @array values to simplify. 

use strict;
use Win32::OLE qw (in);

my @servers=('servera','serverb','serverc');

foreach(@servers) {

  my $server=$_;
  $server=~s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
  my $namespace="\\root\\cimv2";

  my $object=Win32::OLE->GetObject( "winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impe
+rsonate,(security)}//".$server.$namespace );} or die "could not get o
+bject";

  # NOW GET DRIVE INFO THROUGH WMI
}

[download]
The script goes to each server in turn, tries to initiate a WMI connection and fails on one server at the my $object line, due to some issue with the server. Instead of timing out the script just hangs there... forever. Hence the need for a script to somehow prevent this happening.

I am not asking for a solution including alarm, I've already explored using alarm to some depth, however I'm very willing to explore it further when suggestions pop up, i.e. the Time::HiRes one. I did try Win32::Process with the idea that the child could signal its parent after a set amount of time (as a substitue to alarm) but I couldn;t get the parent to seccussfully recieve a signal from it's child process.

In reply to Re^2: simple timeout by disciple01
in thread simple timeout by disciple01

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