Hello Monks. I'm trying to connect to a mainframe with DBI. I understand almost nothing about mainframes. Most of the time the code below works fine. However, once in a while the code can not connect to the mainframe and just spins the cpu (i can see this with the top command on the linux box) and doesn't time out. When this happens I'd like the code to timeout and exit. The weird thing is I tested the following code on a "dummy" infinite loop and it worked in that case. Any ideas on how i can get this to work? Thank you for your help, Erik 
eval{
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" }; # NB: \n required
    alarm($timeout);

    $conn = DBI->connect($connection, $USER, $PASS,
            { RaiseError => 0, AutoCommit => 1 }
    );
    alarm(0);
};
if ($@){
    my_die ( "Unable to login : [$@]: [$conn->errstr]");
}

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In reply to alarm function not working here by egunnar

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