I'm writing a low-level wrapper for backticks so that shelling out to run a command doesn't hang or kill my daemon. I'd like to be able to drop it in wherever I am using backticks without having to make any changes (beyond replacing the backticks with a subroutine call). By low-level I mean that I would prefer to have to do as little as possible within the wrapper -- e.g. as little error handling as possible (so even $@ would be handled outside of the wrapper). Does the code below fit the bill? And more importantly, is there a way to make it look prettier (e.g. reduce duplicate code)?

sub cmd_wrapper {
    my $cmd  = shift;

    # CASE: Called in list context
    if( wantarray() ) {
        my @out; 
        eval { 
            local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
            alarm 15;  # Give the command 15 seconds to return
            @out = `$cmd`; 
            alarm 0;
        };
        return @out;
    }
    # CASE: Called in scalar context
    else {
        my $out; 
        eval { 
            local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
            alarm 15;  # Give the command 15 seconds to return
            $out = `$cmd`; 
            alarm 0;
        };
        return $out;
    }
}
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