The best way I know of to do the latter is not specifically documented in perlipc. Use alarm: 
alarm 10;        # send me a signal in 10 seconds
# do some code which may not complete
alarm 0;        # if we get here in time, disable the alarm

[download]
If you're going to fork off children, be sure to read the section on SIGNALS in perlipc. You might even do something like this, in your child processes: 
eval {
    local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "child process took too long to compl
+ete" };
    alarm 10;
# do whatever your little heart desires, hope it's fast enough
    alarm 0;    # whew, just made it
};
if ($@ && $@ !~ /alarm clock restart/) { # abort the child process gra
+cefully 
} else {
    # send the parent the information ?
}

[download]

In reply to Killing Child Processes by chromatic
in thread Fork/Spawn by Silas

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.