Regarding your use of fork/exec couldn't you use alarm instead? Soemthing like: 
sub cmd_wrapper {
    my( $cmd ) = @_;
    my( $rc , $out );
    
    eval { 
        local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
        alarm 15;
        $out = (`$cmd`)[0]; # Get first line of output   
        $rc = $?;
        alarm 0;
        };
    
    if( $@ ) {
        die "Eval failed for $cmd but not because of alarm" if $@ ne "
+alarm\n"; # Propogate unexpected errors
        die "Eval failed for $cmd because alarm timed out";
        }

    die "Return code undefined for $cmd" unless defined $rc;
    return $rc, $out if wantarray;
    return $rc;
    }

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In reply to Re: avoiding shell escapes with exec() by Argel
in thread avoiding shell escapes with exec() by Anonymous Monk

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