You could use a non-blocking waitpid and simply time all the children, then signal/kill them if they go over whatever limits you set.

(from perldoc -f waitpid) 

use POSIX ":sys_wait_h";
 ...
do {
   $kid = waitpid(-1, WNOHANG);
} until $kid > 0;

[download]

status of the child is in $?

HTH!

In reply to Re: Killing a hanging child process by ozone
in thread Killing a hanging child process by Ovid

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