It is true that Activestate perls have no capability and if you absolutly must use Activestate then alarm is no supported. However on the perl that comes with the cygwin system (running Win98) I ran your code and other basic uses of an alarm with exactly the same behaviour as on my linux system.

In case you don't know it, cygwin runs on most windows platforms and has a pile of modular components including the a good selection of those utilities missing from a non unix system: perl, grep, bash, gcc, tar, wget, and many more.

Cygwin also allows you to compile many perl modules without depending on ppm like Activestate, though in using it some modules avalible in the ppm archives are very difficult/impossible to get to work.

If you are going to be installing perl on many systems anyway then cygwin may be a good option to explore.

In reply to Re: cross-platform timeout on user input by repson
in thread cross-platform timeout on user input by ybiC

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.