http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1020002

gg48gg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In reference to Die silently?, an awesome thread, especially the 'fart' code and the explanations of it...

I recently ran into the need to "die silently", while using the below code. I was getting unwanted "\n"'s inserted that I could not explain. I ended up removing the "die" statement and it works as I want, but I am not sure if I am doing something incorrect (not killing my system command?). This is really my first attempt in using a timed out system command via eval/alarm and could use some review and constructive feedback. Here is my code if you care to help...

sub get_size { my $disk=$_[0]; my $size; eval { local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { print_debug("get_size timed out for device $disk"); die; }; alarm(4); $size=qx(bootinfo -s $disk 2>/dev/null); alarm(0); }; $size=($size)? $size : "unknown"; chomp $size; return $size; }