That (conservatively), probably covers 85% of the uses of such code.

I don't buy that statistic. Either way, it sounds like you're saying 1 failure in 5 attempts is ok!

Are you telling me that you don't see a relatively simple modification to cater for the rest?

Are you saying we're suppose to assume everyone knows that modification is needed and that it was there all along, whatever it might be?

Anyway, I don't call the following a simple modification. 

my $pid = open IN, '-|',
    qq[ perl -E"say scalar localtime, sleep 1 for 1.. $ARGV[0]" ]
    or die $!;

my $buf = '';
if (!do {
    local $SIG{ ALRM } = sub {
        kill -9, $pid;
    };
    alarm 5;
    $buf .= $_ while <IN>;
    waitpid($pid, 0);
    alarm 0;
    die("Can't waitpid: $!\n")                      if $? == -1;
    die("Child killed by signal ".($? & 0x7F)."\n") if $? & 0x7F;
    die("Child returned error ".($? >> 8)."\n")     if $? >> 8;
    1
}) {
    waitpid($pid, 0);
    die("Timeout\n");
}

[download]

In reply to Re^6: fork - alarm - output by ikegami
in thread fork - alarm - output by chart3399

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.