Cheers,

JohnGG

As said before, if you have control over the regex, fix the regex instead.

why alarm does not work?

Because perl normally only acts on most signals between operations and a match is a single operation.
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why alarm does not work?

It depends on how you are (mis)using it. Show us some code, and maybe we can figure out what you are really asking.

This is alot more complex than an alarm, but you could run the regex in a separate thread, and have a second parallel thread time it out. Note you need a later version of threads, and Thread::Cancel. Just an idea. This allows you to issue keypress commands too :-)

#!/usr/bin/perl
# untested and various variable and thread resets ignored  
use warnings;
use strict;
use Glib;
use Term::ReadKey;
use threads;
use threads::shared;
use Thread::Cancel;

$|++;
ReadMode('cbreak');

# works non-blocking if read stdin is in a thread
my $count:shared = 0;
my $done:shared = 0;

my $thr = threads->new(\&read_in)->detach;
my $thr1 = threads->new(\&long_regex); 
# only can cancel non-detached threads

my $main_loop = Glib::MainLoop->new;
my $timer  = Glib::Timeout->add (100, \&timer_callback, undef, 1 );


$main_loop->run;
ReadMode('normal'); # restore normal tty settings

sub timer_callback{
     #do stuff
     $count++;
     print "\n$count\n";
    
     if ( ($count > 10) or ($done == 1)){  
              $thr1->cancel();
             print "thread canceled\n";
             return 0;
         }
    
    return 1;
}

sub long_regex{
        while(1){
         sleep 1;   
         }
     $done = 1;
}

sub read_in{
        while(1){
         my $char;
         if (defined ($char = ReadKey(0)) ) {
            print "\t\t$char->", ord($char),"\n";    
            #process key presses here
            #if($char eq 'q'){exit}
            if(length $char){exit}  # panic button on any key :-)
                
            }
          }
}

__END__
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