Esteemed Monks,

if I were to ask "how do I start a process in the background then kill it after a pre-defined amount of time?", you would direct me to the FAQs, and rightly so.

However, there are two complicating factors: I need to do this on Windows, and I can't use any modules from CPAN, only those that come with one of the common Windows-oriented Perl distributions.

The reason for the second requirement is that I have to work in a very restricted environment where access to the internet is not allowed.

What I actually need this for: I want to write an automated testing tool for one of the programs that I'm working on. This is a huge application whose behavior can be modified with hundreds of options scattered around dozens of config files, and I suspect that there exists a winning combination of options that enable a certain functionality that so far I couldn't entice from the program. Manual testing of all possible combination of all the suspected combination of options would be tedious and error prone, hence the need for this script.

In reply to starting a process in the background, with a twist by Anonymous Monk

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