IO::Socket to recv

[dsb]

I'm trying to open a socket to a service, send a message and receive a response. With the following code, I can do just that:

my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new( PeerAddr => '10.0.0.1',
                                  PeerPort => '22222',
                                  Proto    => 'tcp',
);

print "Connection to 22010 is open\n" if $sock->connected();

my $buf;
$sock->send( $msg );                        
$sock->recv( $buf, 200 );

print "Message: $msg\n";
print "Response: $buf\n";

$sock->close();

The trouble is that if the service is not functioning properly it does not respond, and so the call to recv hangs. It's okay if the server doesn't respond (that's kind of the point of this little smoke test), but I need to just get an empty response and move on...

Thoughts?

[McDarren]

perldoc -q timeout
Found in /usr/share/perl/5.8/pod/perlfaq8.pod
       How do I timeout a slow event?

       Use the alarm() function, probably in conjunction with a
       signal handler, as documented in "Signals"
       in perlipc and the section on ``Signals'' in the Camel.
       You may instead use the more flexible Sys::AlarmCall  module av
+ailable from CPAN.

       The alarm() function is not implemented on all versions of Wind
+ows.  
        Check the documentation for your specific version of Perl.

That should help.... check the specific docs for alarm and eval for more information.

Update:Actually, I just had a look and IO::Socket has its own timeout method. So you probably want to use that :p

[salva]

for a networking app you would probably want to create your sockets as non-blocking and use the select() builtin to determine when data is available for reading or the timeout has expired.