You posted in the wrong place, but hopefully that will be corrected.

Meantime, one solution is Re: Backticks and SIGALRM. There are other possible solutions in that same thread.

That is just a perfect solution for me.

Thanks a bunch to all who responded.

Can we see the non-working code that uses alarm? This is a textbook example of when to use alarm.

Here, the alarm is triggered, and then processing continues:

alarm 5;
$SIG{ALRM} = sub { print "alarm!\n" };
my $yawn = `sleep 10 ; echo "yawn"`;
print "yawn?  $yawn\n";
__END__
alarm!
yawn?  yawn
[download]

In this case (adapted from the example in the alarm documentation), the alarm is triggered, and processing is halted:

my $yawn;
eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
    alarm 5;
    $yawn = `sleep 10 ; echo "yawn"`;
    alarm 0;
};
print $@ ? 'Timed out.' : 'Finished.';
print "\n";
print "yawn? $yawn\n";
__END__
Timed out.
yawn?
[download]

Have you tried that when safe signals are in force?

It certainly doesn't work on the OPs platform (win32 going by his use of MyProgram.exe).

I believe that it also doesn't work on *nix platforms since 5.8.0 unless you explicitly disable safe signals .

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

"Too many [] have been sedated by an oppressive environment of political correctness and risk aversion."

I tried both of my code snippets before posting. My platform is Perl 5.8 on OS X:

kyle@sulaco:~ $ perl -v | head -6

This is perl, v5.8.6 built for darwin-thread-multi-2level
(with 3 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Copyright 1987-2004, Larry Wall

kyle@sulaco:~ $ uname -a
Darwin sulaco 8.10.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.10.0: Wed May 23 16:50:59
+ PDT 2007; root:xnu-792.21.3~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
[download]

I did nothing to disable safe signals. The only part of what I actually executed that I left out of what I posted was my usual "use strict;use warnings;" (and I also cut out the "Use of uninitialized value..." warning that resulted).

I don't have a Windows machine to test on.