I would like to write a subroutine that will take no more than a specified amount of time to run. In this particular case I'm connecting to a web service that is sometimes not there, sometimes takes a long time, and sometimes works just fine. I then use the results to build a little snippet of HTML for use on a CGI generated page. However, if the call to the web service takes too long, I just want to return.

Ideally, I'd like some sort of wrapper sub that takes a subref and a timeout value as parameters and then returns undef on timeout and the subroutine value should the sub return in time. I could also envision some sort of closure type setup where this works.

Please enlighten this humble monk.

In reply to Possible to write a sub that times out??? by geekondemand

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