I see your point but there are instances when the opcode will never return (i.e. name resolution where the udp packet was lost).

Perhaps some of the single opcodes should be two or more by using the reentrant versions of the system calls (if available on the platform).

I'm trying to see some way to either safely abort an operation (i.e connect to a DBI oracle backend) or minimize the damage done (spawning off a process?).

There are two paramount items in enterprise systems: 1) performance 2) reliability. These two have always been at odds but with the inability to safely timeout a connection to an Oracle or Sybase dbms, timeout a name lookup call, etc. the use of perl will be limited to non-production jobs in enterprise systems.

Jason