I've noticed similar problems in the perl test suite when building perl on *some* platforms. See this post on perl5-porters, which never got a response.

To summarise: possible bug in perl or OS bug, work-around it by inserting a micro-sleep using four-arg select() in your loop.

In reply to Re: Cannot catch ALRM signal for timeout by DrHyde
in thread Cannot catch ALRM signal for timeout by Magice

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