alarm is a Unix thing. It requires signals, also a Unix thing. Windows has neither. Perl has an emulation, but it is far from being perfect. When the perl interpreter is blocked, it can not emulate signals and so it can not emulate alarm to interrupt a blocking system call.

See also Re: Handling killing the perl process, Re: Signals in Strawberry Perl: Name or number?, $SIG{ALRM} and windows vista?, and several other threads.

Update: See also "alarm" in perlport:

(Win32) Emulated using timers that must be explicitly polled whenever Perl wants to dispatch "safe signals" and therefore cannot interrupt blocking system calls.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

In reply to Re: Problem enumerating a foreach loop using Win32::OLE->GetObject by afoken
in thread Problem enumerating a foreach loop using Win32::OLE->GetObject by t_rex_joe

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