Animator, thanks for the help. After reading the docs (perldoc -f alarm), I still can't seem to figure out who to use it within a sub/function. Should I fork a process from the sub to monitor the parent? If so, do you have any suggestions that might help me with my quest.
TIA!
perlMunger
It's been quite some time since I've written anything dealing with alarm but something like this may do what you need
$SIG{ALRM} = sub {
#cleanup lockfile
#cleanup anything else
exit;
}
alarm(1200);
# do stuff
# If you have system calls here (i.e. sysread) you
# may need to do some wrapping with eval etc. (as per
# the alarm perldoc
alarm(0);