If you just want to biff the user and let them know you haven't died, perhaps fork off the sort pipeline into another process and then have the parent do a waitpid inside an alarm-ified loop (see perlipc for more examples) that prints a "." or what not. When the wait returns after the child sort is done the parent can move on.

In reply to Re: progress bar for a system command by Fletch
in thread progress bar for a system command by xorl

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