Alarm is not supposed to work reliably. And it doesen't work reliable neither with perl nor with C.

Please check your facts.

Have you heard about something called 'POSIX Signals'? Do you know that one of main differences between those and normal unix signals is reliability?

And yes, none of the comment contain any answers, unless you count as an answer to reliably comment from a saint telling me to use '\n' in die. And then backtracking and saying that one shouldn't use 'die' at all.