I gather from eyepopslikeamosquito's post that a pure-Perl solution that both kills the process on timeout and captures its exit status otherwise is non-trivial.

It is not trivial, but is is not so complex either: 

# untested!
use POSIX qw(WNOHANG _exit);
use Errno qw(ECHILD);

local $SIG{CHLD} = sub {}; # this do-nothing sub ends the
                           # select below on SIGCHLD

my $pid = fork;
if (!$pid) {
    defined $pid or die "fork failed: $!";
    do { exec @cmd }; # warnings friendly!
    _exit(1);
}

my $start = time;
while (1) {
  my $rc = waitpid ($pid, WNOHANG);
  last if $rc == $pid;
  last if $rc < 0 and $! == ECHILD;
  select (undef, undef, undef, 1);
  kill INT => $pid if time > $start + $timeout;
}

[download]

Using AnyEvent it would be even easier.

In reply to Re^2: Need Function for Timing out shell commands by salva
in thread Need Function for Timing out shell commands by bae11208

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