As far as Unix vs windows, ideally both. Ultimately there are 4 target OS's for this program to run on: SUSE 11, RHEL 6, Win Server 2008, Win Server 2008R2

I am developing on a client box running OpenSUSE 11.4, but the final code will live on servers.

I can of course make code changes to port between Unix and Windows, but I would prefer to keep this at a minimum since I will also have a significant task to port the test scripts to run in windows.

I suppose one approach would be to capture the process ID returned from openN or runN, and pass that to a watchdog thread with seconds since epoch. The watchdog thread would watch the time on each process id, and kill the system process rather then the perl thread. Once the process is killed, the handlers will cause the while loop to exit and the thread to continue from the hang. Somewhat like: 

$pid = open2($chldout, $chldin, $cmdstring);
while(<$chldout>){
   #process script output strings
   $mytime=time;
   watchdogQ->enqueue("$pid $mytime");  #"pet the watchdog"
}
   #use $? to determine timeout case or not

[download]

is openN / runN implemented by launching a separate process from my main program, or a thread like implemented? is this approach thread safe?

In reply to Re^2: Thread Safe alarms? by Pocadotty
in thread Thread Safe alarms? by Pocadotty

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.