Without threads:

## Start the program asynchronously
my $pid = system 1, "padprog.exe"; 

## Wait for some period
sleep $timeout;

## If program is still running, kill it
kill 1, $pid if kill 0, $pid;
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Be aware that if your command contains shell meta characters, then the pid will be for cmd.exe, not whatever exectuable it starts, and killing the shell won't normally kill the other process

great! it seems to be the most progressive... I see, you understand the problem as for complex scripts and so cmd.exe ... but I think that it will be some kind of process tree for windows, I'm right?
perl->cmd.exe->prog.exe

maybe there is a way to follow the process tree or kill cmd.exe in such a way that all children will be also killed? Thaanks)

maybe there is a way to follow the process tree or kill cmd.exe in such a way that all children will be also killed?

Yes. Use Win32::CreateProcess and the include CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP. Use it to start cmd.exe and then supply your complex command line.

When you kill cmd.exe, any child processes it has created will be killed also.

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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."

Better yet, see Re: Killing children's of children & Re^3: Killing children's of children

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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."

Sorry, such thing will not work.
1) Win32::Process does what you say even more elegantly..
2) Everything around threads and shared things I have implemented - such a wrapper
3) So, this will not work because of I will have to use complex commands, such as system ("FOR /R %g DO prog.exe %g ")
So, you see, common process launch will not work :(

But nevertheless, Thanks for useful info about that alarms don't work well with threads!).. now I don't know what to do.

If there will be no ideas, I'll use .bat-files or Win32::Process..

Contrary to what you said, (3) will work with CreateProcess. Remember that it's a shell command, so launch cmd.exe to execute the command. system uses CreateProcess, so anything system can do, so can CreateProcess.

A separate timer thread will work if you set it up right, I don't understand why it wouldn't. You start 2 threads, which run independent. When the timer reaches the end of it's code block, if a finished flag isn't set, it kills the pid from the other thread. But I don't use windows, and maybe I don't experience it's peculiarities. This works on linux. (Granted it is easier if you have an eventloop system in main).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared;

#my $finished:shared = 0;
my $timer_go:shared = 0;
#my $worker_go:shared = 0;
#my $worker_pid:shared = '';

my $worker = threads->create(\&worker);
my $timer = threads->create(\&timer,$worker);


print "hit enter to start\n";
<>;
$timer_go=1;
<>;

$timer->join();
$worker->join();


sub timer {
  my $worker = shift;
   while(1){     
       if($timer_go){
        my $count = 0;
             while(1){ 
                  $count++;
                  if($count > 5){    
                         print "timed out\nHit enter to finish\n";
                          # Send a signal to a thread
                         $worker->kill('INT');
                         return;
                        } 
                  sleep 1;
                  print "timing $count\n";
            }
       }else{sleep 1}
    }
}

sub worker {
       $|++;
       $SIG{INT} = sub{ warn "Caught Zap!\n"; sleep 1; exit; };
       my $worker_pid = open( READ, "top -d 1 -b |" );
       print "\t$worker_pid\n";
       return;
}
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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth CandyGram for Mongo

Thanks! I've looked for description of it and seems it matches what I need, but I decided to use another solution (please look slighter above if interesting) - it doesn't need any installations from CPAN and seems to work well...

oh, great! thanks! it works (even here, on windows XP), but launched process (I'm testing launching notepad.exe) is not closed... are there any ideas? It must be closed because after some time the server will be overflooded with the hanging processes.