In case it's of use, I wrote a couple of scripts years ago to run an external command on both Unix and Windows, killing it if it took more than a specified timeout, and reporting how long it took to run:

• Timing and timing out Unix commands (using fork, exec, kill, waitpid)
• Timing Windows commands (first attempt using Win32::Process)
• Re: Timing Windows commands (improved version using Win32::Job)

I enjoyed using Win32::Job much more that Win32::Process. BTW, I never use fork/exec emulation on Windows, too much general weirdness and confusion between threads and processes for my tastes.

Related Win32 Modules by Jan Dubois

• Win32::Process
• Win32::Job
• Win32::File
• Win32::Console
• Win32::Pipe
• Win32::Registry
• Win32

Other Handy Win32 Modules

• Win32::LongPath by Robert Boisvert - mentioned by ikegami in Re^3: how are ARGV and filename strings represented?

See Also

• Re^3: Parallel::ForkManager install fails (Apr 2024)
• how to system call that exits by ObiPanda (Apr 2024)
• exec() fails with strange message by dissident (May 2024)

Updated: Added See Also and Related Win32 Modules by Jan Dubois sections