This worked great, but I can't get the handler to work. It gives me a "Spurious backslash ignored" on the "$SIG{ALRM} = \&sighandler;" line. I'm not an advanced Perl programmer, so I'm not quite sure where to go, but the alarm() call worked well. Thanks. Ian. BTW, we're still on Perl 4.xxxx (Aaarrrrgh! Don't say anything about this!) :-)