socket time out

[xarex]

Hi monks
i have a forking server that is accepting connections, writing a log and then closing
The proble i have is that sometimes, the client does not send data
and this is keeping the connection open,
is there some way that i can close the connection say after 2 min if there is no data sent?
below is a snippet of what i currently have

while(my $connection = $server->accept){
  my $name = $connection->peerhost;
  my $port = $connection->peerport;
  if (my $pid = fork){
     close $connection;
     next; # on to the next connection
   }else{
     # child process - handle connection
     print $connection "You're connected to the server!\n";
      while (<$connection>){
        use HTTP::Date;
        my ($date, $time) = split(" ", HTTP::Date::time2iso());
        my ($hour, $min) = split(":", $time);

        open (my $log, '+>>',"../../home/freetrac/public_html/logs/$po
+rt $date.txt")
            || die "Couldn't open log.txt: $!";

        print $log $_;
        close $log;

        exit(0);


     }
     $connection->shutdown(SHUT_RDWR);
     exit;
   }

 }

Any help would be great
Thanks
K-

[oha]

you could try using alarm in an eval block (untested):

eval {
    local $SIG{'ALRM'} = sub { die "Timed out" };
    alarm($timeout);
    while(<$conn>) {
       ....
       alarm($timeout);
    }
    alarm(0);
}
if ($@ =~ /Timed out/) {
    print STDOUT "Timed Out.\r\n";
}

Oha

[xarex]

being new to perl i tried that exactly as you said
but its giving complitaion errors,
could you please try to be a little more specific?
Thanks
K-

[Anonymous Monk]

It's just missing a ; in the example at the end of the eval closing brace:

eval {
    local $SIG{'ALRM'} = sub { die "Timed out" };
    alarm($timeout);
    while(<$conn>) {
       ....
       alarm($timeout);
    }
    alarm(0);
};
if ($@ =~ /Timed out/) {
    print STDOUT "Timed Out.\r\n";
}

[weismat]

Use IO::Select.

my $select=new IO::Select();
$select->add($connection);
if ($select->can_read($timeout) {
    #handle timely answer
} else {
    #timeout
}