Hail all Monks!

I want to try reading from a handle (a pipe in my case) and timing out if nothing happens after X seconds. I'm using a $SIG{ALRM} right now, but that involves a callback when all I really want to do is stop trying to read and continue execution right after the read. I found myself considering a GOTO inside the $SIG{ALRM} callback, and that's when I decided a perlmonks post was in order.

To clarify, here's the code of my $SIG{ALRM} rendition:

# $read is an open pipe from earlier
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { goto('WIBBLE');  };
alarm(60);
$result = <$read>;
:WIBBLE
if ( !defined($result) ) {
   print "Oh well, I didn't need that anyway...\n";
}

[download]

And to restate my question: What's the best way to handle a timeout like this?

In reply to Best way to timeout on a read by pileofrogs

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