I've had some good experiences with IPC::Run3 -- it aims for speed, simplicity and portability. Its docs have some comparisons to other alternatives, such as IPC::Open3 etc. It doesn't have a timeout, but I think your alarm code might work.

-xdg

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In reply to Re: Safe cross-platform command execution and capture of STDOUT & STDERR by xdg
in thread Safe cross-platform command execution and capture of STDOUT & STDERR by mattski

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