Re: alarm() on windows 2003, overview

[EdwardG]

Looking at the ActiveState sources, it seems 5.8.3 had the first Win32 implementation of alarm(). Here's the changelog comment -

[ 21901] By: nicholas              on 2003/12/13  21:22:15
        Log: Integrate:
             ...
             
             [ 21895]
             alarm() is now implemented on Win32.
             
             ...

And from looking inside win32.c it seems that win32_alarm() uses SetTimer.

And yes, the behaviour of SetTimer has changed from Win 2000 to Win 2003

On 2000 if the timeout "is greater than USER_TIMER_MAXIMUM, the timeout is set to 1."

On 2003 SP1 if the timeout "is greater than USER_TIMER_MAXIMUM, the timeout is set to USER_TIMER_MAXIMUM."

That might be your problem, maybe.

[Anonymous Monk]

15.7.1. Problem You want to sound an alarm on the user's terminal.

15.7.2. Solution
Print the "\a" character to sound a bell: 

print "\aWake up!\n";
Or use the "vb" terminal capability to show a visual bell:

use Term::Cap;

$OSPEED = 9600;
eval {
    require POSIX;
    my $termios = POSIX::Termios->new( );
    $termios->getattr;
    $OSPEED = $termios->getospeed;
};

$terminal = Term::Cap->Tgetent({OSPEED=>$OSPEED});
$vb = "";
eval {
    $terminal->Trequire("vb");
    $vb = $terminal->Tputs('vb', 1);
};

print $vb;                                  # ring visual bell
15.7.3. Discussion
The "\a" escape is the same as "\cG", "\007", and "\x07". They all cor
+respond to the ASCII BEL character and cause an irritating ding. In a
+ crowded terminal room at the end of the semester, this beeping cause
+d by dozens of vi novices all trying to get out of insert mode at onc
+e can be maddening. The visual bell is a workaround to avoid irritati
+on. Based upon the polite principle that terminals should be seen and
+ not heard (at least, not in crowded rooms), some terminals let you b
+riefly reverse the foreground and background colors to give a flash o
+f light instead of an audible ring.

Not every terminal supports the visual bell, which is why we eval the 
+code that finds it. If the terminal doesn't support it, Trequire will
+ die without having changed the value of $vb from "". If the terminal
+ does support it, the value of $vb will be set to the character seque
+nce to flash the bell.

There's a better approach to the bell issue in graphical terminal syst
+ems like xterm. Many of these let you enable the visual bell from the
+ enclosing application itself, allowing all programs that blindly out
+put a chr(7) to become less noisy.