Hi I tried the Sig alarm idea and found the Signal was blocked by the open file hanging. Had the following code The Sigalarm subroutine never got called after the NFS got dropped.. $SIG{SIGALRM)=sub {do something}; while(true) { alarm 5; # set a 5 second alarm if(!open(TESTMOUNT,"$testfile")) { do something } else { do somethineelse } close(TESTMOUNT); alarm 0; # disable alarm sleep 5; }