Greetings,

I am trying to set an alarm to stop a script from sending the load on my machine to the moon. I am using Image::Magick::Thumbnail::PDF to create PNG thumbnails of the first page of a bunch of PDF docs.

ImageMagick uses Ghostscript to parse the PDFs and occasionally a PDF will cause one of them problems, causing my script to hang endlessly sending the load really high on the machine (eventually it gets killed actually). When this happens I want to skip that PDF and move on to the next.

This is what I have, but it is not working on start up. If I hit control-c, then it starts doing its thing... why is that? I want this to run as a cron. 

foreach my $pdf (@pdfs) {
    
    my $png = "/path/to/thumbs/" . $pdf . ".png";
    
    if (!stat($png)) {
    
        eval {
            local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
            alarm(10);
            create_thumbnail($pdf,$png);
            alarm(0);
            print "Created: $pdf\n";
        };

        if ($@) {

            die unless $@ eq "alarm\n";
            print " >> Timeout On: $pdf\n";
            next;
        }
    }
}

[download]

Thanks!

In reply to Setting an alarm by Rodster001

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