Says bluto:

I'm trying to figure out an effective way of timing out shell commands in Perl.

The technique I usually use for this is to make a very small tool called stopafter:

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  # stopafter - run a command with a timeout
  my $time = shift;
  alarm($time);
  exec @ARGV;
  die "Couldn't exec @ARGV: $!; aborting";
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To use stopafter, you say something like this:

    stopafter 300 command arg arg...
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The command runs, but it dies automatically after 300 seconds.

Now in your Perl program, use:

    open FH, "stopafter 10 command |" or die ...;
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Now read from the pipe as usual. After 10 seconds, the timer expires and you get an end-of-file condition on the pipe.

Hope this helps.

--
Mark Dominus
Perl Paraphernalia

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