Basically, what I am trying to do is this: I have a timer that does a countdown from a specified time. I would like for that timer to do a countdown, while in the background a command is being run. As soon as the command gets the output that it needs, the timer is ended and the script resumes flow. Here's what I have:

# Countdown Timer
sub sleep_count {
    my $minutes = shift;
    my $string = shift;
    my $command = shift;
    my $command_time_interval = shift;
    my $countdown = $minutes*60; # in secs.

    $| = 1;

    my $beg_time = time;
    my $end_time = $beg_time + $countdown;

    for (;;) {
        my $time = time;
        last if ($time >= $end_time);
        printf("\r[ %02d:%02d ] $string",
        ($end_time - $time) / (   60) % 60,
        ($end_time - $time)           % 60,
        );
        sleep(1);
    }
}

[download]
my $pid = fork();
if ($pid == 0) {
    sleep_count(3, 'Verifying with Nagios that resin is down: ');
}
else {
    my $nagios_check = `/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http -H host.com
+ -I $ip -p 80`;
    until ( $nagios_check !~ /HTTP OK HTTP\/1.0 200 OK/ ) {
        $nagios_check = `/usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http -H host.co
+m -I $ip -p 80`;
        sleep 10;
    }
    waitpid($pid,0);
}

[download]
So basically what I am trying to do is check Nagios every 10 seconds for 3 minutes until the server is reported as down. While this check is going on there is a timer that reports how much time of the 3 minutes is left. As soon as Nagios returns that the server is down, the timer is stopped and script continues on.

I realize I am probably not on the right track, but any help is really appreciated. Thanks guys/girls!

In reply to Having a difficult time understanding fork() by walkingthecow

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