Ah, OK. So you want to be able to kill off the offending sub-process when the alarm fires? Then you either need to walk the process table, looking for a process whose parent is your script, or start the process in a way which allows you to get the pid and the output.

e.g. run the code under a piped open, something like this (untested): 

   my $cmd = "your command";
   my $pid = open(my $fh, "$cmd|");
   $SIG{ALRM} = sub {
     print "Alarm fired, killing pid $pid\n";
     # Replace with windows-specific code to kill process
     kill 15, $pid;
   };
   die "Can't run command [$cmd] : $!" unless $pid;

   # Or do some other processing with $fh
   push @result, $_ while (<$fh>);
   close $fh
     or die "Problem running [$cmd] : $?";

[download]
If your child process starts yet more children (and they don't exit when the parent is killed), you'll have to write more elaborate cleanup code.

Dig through the windows-related process modules on CPAN and you should find what you need for the cleanup.

In reply to Re^3: Backticks and SIGALRM by jbert
in thread Backticks and SIGALRM by nemo

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