Re: Win32: timing out a perl subroutine

Have you looked at Win32::Process? If I'm interpreting you correctly, this seems to give you what you want:

use Win32::Process;

Win32::Process::Create($ProcessObj,
               "c:\\Perl\\bin\\perl.exe",
               "perl -e \"print q(yr code here\n)\"",
               1,  
               NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS,
               ".")

$a = $ProcessObj->Wait(1000);         # units = ms
$ProcessObj->Kill($some_exit_code);

print "[$a] ==> I *think* this will be zero if the " .
  " process terminated on its own before Wait() finished\n";
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If the code in the $ProcessObj calls exit() on its own, the exit value will be retreivable via:

$ProcessObj->GetExitCode($exitvalue);
print "The code returned: $exitvalue\n";
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Not the most elegant solution (what with having to respecify the path for perl.exe, and I assume it's more memory intensive) but that's Win32 for you.

N.B.: That '1' means that the new process inherits the same filehandles as the code that produces it. If you don't want that, change it to '0'.

There's a lot of additional flags besides NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS. In particular, you can use

DETACHED_PROCESS 
CREATE_NEW_CONSOLE 
DETACHED_PROCESS | IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS
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(Note that's a bitwise or in the last example.) These flags are really poorly documented - I recommend finding one of Dave Roth's Win32 books).

-- Frag.

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Re: Re: Win32: timing out a perl subroutine by osfameron (Hermit) on Jun 20, 2001 at 14:42 UTC
Thanks: I agree that the Win32::Process module is really badly documented - Dave Roth's documentations is much better. `<Aside>`and that's an issue for many of the Win32 modules... For example, Win32::Console is a good module, but it makes me tear my hair out trying to get it to do what I want: if I ever have time I'd re-document it.`</Aside>` But though that's a useful code snippet which I'll file away for future use, it doesn't allow me to return a value from a subroutine within the current perl script. Unix users, using the alarm() implementation of timeouts, have no problem doing a pre-emptive timeout of any arbitrary code. I'd be interested to hear from other `my $os!~/l?[ui]n[ui]x/` users about how/if they can do timeouts on their perl. Cheerio! Osfameron	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Win32::Timeout by osfameron (Hermit) on Jun 21, 2001 at 13:23 UTC
I've posted a module for review which is a very scrappy and buggy first try at implementing this sort of timeout. Comments/review welcome! Update Well no comments as yet, but I've found even more bugs... hey ho Cheerio! Osfameron	[reply]