Alarm Timer Win32

[cutter]

Not getting the desired behavior from the alarm function on WinXP Activestate Perl 5.8.6. It alarms at 1 sec, nothing greater. Reading the release notes I see where signals are handled after a operation is complete. So I guess this is expected behaviour or is something else going on here? Any sugestions on how to make a timer on my ssh session without using alarm()?

use strict;
use Net::SSH::Perl;    #Use this perl mod to create the SSH session.
use Net::SSH::W32Perl;

my $host = "";
my $user = "";
my $pw = "";
sub error {
   die "ERROR! ERROR! ERROR! @_";
}

sub ssh_cmd{

    my $ssh = new Net::SSH::W32Perl($host);
        $ssh->login($user, $pw);


    my $cmd = "./test_alarm.pl > test_alarm.out 2>&1";

    my ($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($cmd,"\n");
}


    my $TIMEOUT = 2; # seconds
eval {   
   local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };   
   alarm $TIMEOUT;  
   ssh_cmd();
   alarm 0;
   };

if ($@) {
   if($@ eq "alarm\n") {
      error("OPERATION TIMED OUT!");
   } else {
      error("your_code() generated errors: $@");
   }
}

[puploki]

Despite Windows NT variants claiming to be POSIX compliant (laughs) SIGALRM is not supported under Windows. Well, rather, it claims it is, but doesn't work as you've found out.

Perhaps an approach might be to fork() an external watcher process that looks for an established tcp connection with netstat which returns after x seconds if it doesn't find it or something - vile and horrible I know... Bloody Windows ;)

[cutter]

Agree with you on the vile and horrible. I was hoping it was just me doing something stupid but I guess not.

Bloody Windows....

[polypompholyx]

alarm never used to work on Windows/Activeperl (winfaq5), so you may not have much luck with this.

[PodMaster]

Try unsafe signals (set PERL_SIGNALS=unsafe).

[cutter]

You da man!! That seems to do the trick.