$SIG{ALRM}=\&AlarmHandler;

Well, that looks right as far as it goes. But if your program is printing "Alarm Clock" and then dieing, then you almost certainly are not setting up your alarm handler properly. Perhaps you are doing this too late, undoing it too early, have it in some conditional that you think is being run but isn't, etc. Perhaps some other code is setting up its own alarm handler and overwriting yours. You might want to step through this with the Perl debugger.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")