alarm is the usual way to set a timeout. Set it when you fork, and reset it if the child exits in time.

Use select to poll for available data on each of your filehandles, adding to a variable to keep track of the amount of output they've produced.

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

In reply to Re: Redirecting stdout/stderr to pipe by Roy Johnson
in thread Redirecting stdout/stderr to pipe by 0xbeef

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