It sounds like you're saying 1 failure in 5 attempts is ok!

Oh give over. Is that really how you read that?

It never crossed your mind that I meant that if the programmer knows his program outputs more than the simple solution can handle, then he considers using the "more complex" solution?

Not that it needs to be much more complex: A whole 3 lines:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads;

my $pid = open IN, '-|',  qq[ 
perl -E"\$t=time; say ~~localtime, select'','','',.0001 while time() <
+ \$t + $ARGV[0]" 
] or die $!;

async {
    eval {
        local $SIG{ ALRM } = sub {
            kill -9, $pid;
            warn 'timeout';
        };
        alarm 5;
        waitpid $pid, 0;
        alarm 0;
    };
}->detach;

while( <IN> ){
   print;
}

__END__
c:\test>junk 4 >junk.log

c:\test>dir junk.log
08/06/2010  17:58        13,703,760 junk.log

c:\test>junk 6 >junk.log
timeout at C:\test\junk.pl line 13.

c:\test>dir junk.log
08/06/2010  17:58        22,759,264 junk.log
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