http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=964545


in reply to trying to get timeout to work

alarm doesn't automatically kill the piped subprocess (and the parent waits for it), so you need to take care of this yourself, e.g. in the signal handler

use Sys::SigAction qw( set_sig_handler ); eval { my $h = set_sig_handler( 'ALRM' ,sub { kill 15, $opened; # <-- die "TIMEOUT\n"; }, { ...