Fork Question

EchoAngel has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks, I am looking for a function that will make a system call, probably using fork, and if that system call exceeds a certain time limit, the parent process will kill it. but if the system call completes normally within the time limit, nothing will happen... thanks for your help

Comment on Fork Question

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Re: Fork Question by Tanktalus (Canon) on Apr 13, 2005 at 22:00 UTC
A bit of Super Searching found ... Timeout with SIG{ALRM} not working as expected Random Walk's note at the bottom may hold the key. Re^5: Splitting one large timeout into few smaller ones.. Roy Johnson has some code you can steal/adapt. Timeout on system command Looks like a similar problem ... and even has links to more nodes on the problem system() with timeout Again, similar problem - with some sage advice Hope these help. For the record, I searched on "fork kill alarm".	[reply]
Re: Fork Question by eibwen (Friar) on Apr 14, 2005 at 00:17 UTC
Since you're limiting a system call, you can use BSD::Resource or the equivalent system call.	[reply]