"Emulated" or not, alarm works fine on Windows. As do both forms of piped open:

C:\test>perl -E"alarm 5; say(),sleep(1) for 1 .. 10"
1
2
3
4
5
Terminating on signal SIGALRM(14)

C:\test>perl -E"$p=open I, '-|', 'ver'; say <I>"

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6001]


C:\test>perl -E"$p=open O, '|-', 'find \"1\"'; say O for 1 .. 10"
1
10
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I thought alarm did work fine but the OP wrote "... alarm is not working in windows.". As I don't have a Windows Perl in front of me, I checked the doco. I wasn't trying to make any point by using the word emulated - that's just what the doco says: "alarm Emulated using timers ...".

Scrolling down the perlport page a bit after reading about alarm, I came across the open entry by chance. It seems the doco is just wrong with respect to piped open. perlport says it's "unsupported"; perlfork says it's "not yet implemented".

Thanks for the example code.

-- Ken

that's just what the doco says: "alarm Emulated using timers ...".

In the sense that the OS has neither a native alarm API nor *nix-style signals, it is emulated.

But then again, under modern versions of *nix including linux, the original form of alarm is also "emulated with timers", so not so different.

perlport says it's "unsupported"; perlfork says it's "not yet implemented".

A lot of those more obscure docs have never been updated to reflect the current state of play unfortunately.

---

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

RIP Neil Armstrong

Well blow me down, BrowserUK is correct. I've never gotten alarm() to work reliably on Windows - perhaps because I'm not that versed in Signals and didn't know what I was doing or was trying on a system call without the eval/die as described in alarm; however, alarm() added in my original script works:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $pid = open(my $fileHandler, '-|', "./test.exe" );

my $DONE = 0;
$SIG{ALRM} = sub { $DONE = 1 };
alarm 2;

while (<$fileHandler>) {
    print "$_\r"; # \r to not overrun output screen buffer
    last if ($DONE)
}

print "\nTimeout! - Time to kill pid: $pid\n"
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And the output

VinsWorldcom@C:\Users\VinsWorldcom\tmp> TimeThis test.pl

TimeThis :  Command Line :  test.pl
TimeThis :    Start Time :  Fri Oct 12 13:01:09 2012

114601
Timeout! - Time to kill pid: 4700

TimeThis :  Command Line :  test.pl
TimeThis :    Start Time :  Fri Oct 12 13:01:09 2012
TimeThis :      End Time :  Fri Oct 12 13:01:12 2012
TimeThis :  Elapsed Time :  00:00:02.454
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