note VinsWorldcom <p>I too have had issues with alarm() on Windows. This is a quick workaround - not very efficient or accurate, but close to the timeout you want. $timeout is number of seconds to run before timing out.</p> <p><b>NOTE:</b> I need an "infinite output" .exe so the './test.exe' program just prints numbers 1 .. 100000 to the screen. I set my $timeout for 2 seconds.</p> <c> use strict; use warnings; my $pid = open(my $fileHandler, '-|', "./test.exe" ); my $start = time; my $timeout = 2; while (<$fileHandler>) { print "$_\r"; # \r to not overrun output screen buffer last if ((time - $start) >= $timeout); } print "\nTimeout! - Time to kill pid: $pid\n" </c> <p>And the output:</p> <c> VinsWorldcom@C:\Users\VinsWorldcom\tmp> TimeThis test.pl TimeThis : Command Line : test.pl TimeThis : Start Time : Fri Oct 12 10:42:04 2012 56464 Timeout! - Time to kill pid: 4192 TimeThis : Command Line : test.pl TimeThis : Start Time : Fri Oct 12 10:42:04 2012 TimeThis : End Time : Fri Oct 12 10:42:06 2012 TimeThis : Elapsed Time : 00:00:01.903 </c> <p>Of course you could maybe use [cpan://Time::HiRes] to get more accurate.</p> 998662 998662