What makes you think those won't be interrupted? alarm is a signals. Signals happen now. One of the discussions is to make signals "safe", meaning
they wouldn't interrupt a Perl opcode, and your example is correct. But for now,
they are dangerous, and poof! You be gone. {grin}
Um, 30 seconds is waaay longer than I would want to run one of those on a box with no limits and nothing in place to handle resource starvation gracefully...
Trust me, I am not sitting at the counter now. This is one I have definitely been there on. :-(Why, tell me why, does Linux seem to think that klogd is a good target?)-: