Re^7: fork - alarm - output

[BrowserUk]

It sounds like you're saying 1 failure in 5 attempts is ok!

Oh give over. Is that really how you read that?

It never crossed your mind that I meant that if the programmer knows his program outputs more than the simple solution can handle, then he considers using the "more complex" solution?

Not that it needs to be much more complex: A whole 3 lines:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads;

my $pid = open IN, '-|',  qq[ 
perl -E"\$t=time; say ~~localtime, select'','','',.0001 while time() <
+ \$t + $ARGV[0]" 
] or die $!;

async {
    eval {
        local $SIG{ ALRM } = sub {
            kill -9, $pid;
            warn 'timeout';
        };
        alarm 5;
        waitpid $pid, 0;
        alarm 0;
    };
}->detach;

while( <IN> ){
   print;
}

__END__
c:\test>junk 4 >junk.log

c:\test>dir junk.log
08/06/2010  17:58        13,703,760 junk.log

c:\test>junk 6 >junk.log
timeout at C:\test\junk.pl line 13.

c:\test>dir junk.log
08/06/2010  17:58        22,759,264 junk.log

[ikegami]

That removes the reaping on timeout. Maybe that's ok, but I doubt it since since the OP posted a reusable function, and he specifically did reap in that situation.

[BrowserUk]

That removes the reaping on timeout.

It isn't there because I never have to think about such things. But again, putting it back and wrapping it in a function, is hardly onerous.

[ikegami]

It wasn't about whether it's onerous to fix or not, it was about whether the OP would notice it or not.