Hi, I need to be able to safely execute local commands on both Unix and Win32 platforms in a way that captures both the STDERR and STDOUT from the command using Perl 5.6.1. The code must have a configurable timeout too. Has anyone got any ideas about the best way to do this? I had thought about something along these lines but I can't see a way of easily getting STDERR & STDOUT with this. Any suggestions for improvement are also most welcome ... 
my $err;
my @output;
eval {
   local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
   alert 10;
   my $pid = open(PIPE,"-|") or die "Error: $!";
   exec @command_array or die "Error: $!";
   while(<PIPE>) {
     push(@output,$_);
   }
   close PIPE;
   if(kill('TERM',$pid)) { warn "Killed PID $pid\n"; }
};
alarm 0;
if($@ && $@ ne "alarm\n") {
   $err = "Non-timeout error: $@";
   push(@output,$err);
} else {
   $err = "Timeout error: $@";
   push(@output,$err);
}

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In reply to Safe cross-platform command execution and capture of STDOUT & STDERR by mattski

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