This is an awesome thread, especially the 'fart' code and the explanations of it. I recently ran into this "die quietly" issue using the below code. I was getting unwanted "\n"'s inserted that I could not explain. I ended up removing the "die" statement and it works as I want, but I am not sure if I am doing something incorrect (not killing my system command?). This is really my first attempt in using a timed out system command via eval/alarm. Here is my code if you care to review it and give me some feedback.
sub get_size {
my $disk=$_[0];
my $size;
eval {
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub {
print_debug("get_size timed out for device $disk");
die;
};
alarm(4);
$size=qx(bootinfo -s $disk 2>/dev/null);
alarm(0);
};
$size=($size)? $size : "unknown";
chomp $size;
return $size;
}