Okay. With

use Net::FTP;
$ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name", Debug => 0);
$ftp->login("anonymous",'-anonymous@');
$ftp->cwd("/pub");
$ftp->get("that.file");
$ftp->quit;
[download]

Is there any way to put a time limit on the actual file transfer?

Thanks again.

John Bobinyec

Try the option TimeOut in the constructor. By default this option will take as 120 check the link "http://perldoc.perl.org/Net/FTP.html"

use Net::FTP;
$ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name", Debug => 0, Timeout => 300);
$ftp->login("anonymous",'-anonymous@');
$ftp->cwd("/pub");
$ftp->get("that.file");
$ftp->quit;
[download]

This is untested but you could try to put an eval-alarm combination in there to time the get. Something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Net::FTP;
$ftp = Net::FTP->new("some.host.name", Debug => 0);
$ftp->login("anonymous",'-anonymous@');

my $timeout = 60;
my $time;
eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "timeout!" };
    alarm $timeout;
    
    $ftp->cwd("/pub");
    $ftp->get("that.file");
    $ftp->quit;
 
    $time = alarm 0;
  }
  if ($@)
{
    if ( $@ =~ /timeout/ ) {

        #do something
    }
    else {

        #do something else for other failures
    }
}
else {
    print "External call finished in " . ( $timeout - $time ) . " seco
+nds\n";
}
[download]

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh