Timeouts in Perl 5.6 (under Win32)

herby1620 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

We use Active State Perl 5.6.1 here. I can't easily change it, so I need to live with it. I'm attempting to do timeouts of a command/external program and the 'cookbook' solution says use 'alarm'. OOOPS 'alarm' isn't in Active State Perl 5.6 (it is in 5.8, but I can't use it). My question:

What is a good way to do a timeout in Win32 Perl 5.6?

This can't be a too difficult thing to do these days (or is it?).

Thanks .

Comment on Timeouts in Perl 5.6 (under Win32)

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Re: Timeouts in Perl 5.6 (under Win32) by Joost (Canon) on Oct 18, 2006 at 20:20 UTC
I'm not sure how well supported this is, especially on such an old perl/windows version, but you might try issuing signals (using the kill function) from another process or thread. Take a look at fork and threads / Thread. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply]
Re: Timeouts in Perl 5.6 (under Win32) by syphilis (Archbishop) on Oct 18, 2006 at 23:47 UTC
Launch the external program by using the Win32::Process module (which you should already have). You can then make use of that module's Wait() method to time out the external program. (See 'perldoc Win32::Process'.) Cheers, Rob	[reply]