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