It's possible to terminate some varieties of infinite looping with alarm(): 

# setup an ALRM handler
my $timed_out = 0;
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "Timed out!" };

# run some code for 10 seconds max
eval {
  alarm 10; # let it run 10 seconds
  eval($code);
  die $@ if $@;
};

# figure out if it got an alarm
warn "Alarm rang!" if $@ and $@ =~ /Timed out!/;

[download]

However, an infinitely running regex would probably not get interupted here due to Perl's new safe-signals implementation which only looks for new signals between op-codes.

-sam

In reply to Re: Stopping code in eval by samtregar
in thread Stopping code in eval by Outaspace

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.