On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 07:24, Michael Alipio <daem0n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry about the indention... must be the mail client i'm using.
> I need to fork because the external program I want to run inside the child
> runs infinitely. I want to have a timer running in the parent and after that,
> kill the child. Without forking, I have to do a pkill myprogname
> I'm reading the perlipc now.. nothing so far..
snip
You don't need a fork for that, you need alarm[1] and block eval[2]:
eval {
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "timeout\n" };
alarm 3; #die after three seconds
#operation that needs to die if it is not finished in three seconds;
alarm 0; #turn off the alarm clock
1; #make the eval return true
} or {
#propagate the error unless it is the timeout
die $@ unless $@ eq "alarm\n";
};
1. http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/alarm.html
2. http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/eval.html
--
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.
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