Is there a way to timeout a print/read operations on tcp socket on ActiveState Perl 5.12? 
my $sock = new IO::Socket::INET(
    LocalHost => $address,
    LocalPort => 0,
    Proto     => 'tcp',
    Listen    => 10,
    Reuse     => 1,
);

my $s = $sock->accept;

# how to timeout this?
my $message = <$s>;

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In above example i would like to wait max 3 seconds for a message and then close this connection. I found that these solutions don't work:
1. Timeout option in socket constructor is related to connect/accept calls so it's useless for me
2. trick with eval/$SIG{ALRM}/alarm() don't work on ActiveState Perl (AFAIK ALRM signal is not supported)
Is there any other way?

This brings me to another question, threads-related. Let's assume that my thread is performing a "blocking" operation like: executing a SQL procedure, reading from socket (as in above example) or is locked at a semaphore. How can i break execution of that thread? Sending signals won't work since they are processed only after the blocking operation is completed. Is that even possible?

In reply to Locked threads and tcp timeouts by menth0l

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