Well, yes.

If you're worried about terminating the spawned program, don't use backticks. Most of the time, I don't use backticks anyway. I'd much rather do something like this:

my $cmd_pid = open my $cmd_fh, '-|', $cmd
    or die "Can't run '$cmd': $!\n";
my $yawn = do { local $/; <$cmd_fh> };
close $cmd_fh;
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It does the same thing, and it complains about errors, and it gives me the PID of the child process, which I can use to cause the sort of interruption you're looking for:

my $start_time = time;
sub exec_time { return time - $start_time }
my $cmd = 'sleep 3600 ; echo "yawn"';
my $yawn;
my $cmd_pid = open my $cmd_fh, '-|', $cmd
    or die "Can't run '$cmd': $!\n";
eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { kill 15, $cmd_pid; die "alarm\n" };
    alarm 5;
    $yawn = do { local $/; <$cmd_fh> };
    alarm 0;
};
close $cmd_fh;
printf "(%d) yawn?  $yawn", exec_time();
__END__
(5) yawn?
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Note that in this case, if I don't kill the child, the program will still hang when it gets to close, because that will wait for the pipe to finish. You can put the close inside the eval, but then you have a filehandle dangling open.

Note also that if the child spawns a child (as it does in this case because the child is sh -c), then that grandchild is not killed. I don't see that there's much to do about that in any case.

Also, just for the record, this morning I'm testing on a different machine.

kyle@xxx:~$ perl -v | head -5

This is perl, v5.8.8 built for i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi

Copyright 1987-2006, Larry Wall

kyle@xxx:~$ uname -a
Linux xxx 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GN
+U/Linux
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