in reply to Processing command line arguments

  1. No, there isn't an @ARGV2. All the elements on the command-line end up in @ARGV. The standard Getopt::Std and Getopt::Long can help you parse the command-line options.
  2. One way of doing this is having a SIGALRM signal sent to your process. This can be done using the alarm system call (perldoc -f alarm).
Arjen

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom