system() with timeout

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 07:44:39PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 06:32:08PM +0100, Paul LeoNerd Evans wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 06:18:45PM +0100, David Cantrell wrote:
> > > Anyone recommend a module to give me something like system(@list) but
> > > with a timeout?
> > Does IPC::Run have something suitable? I seem to recall it has quite a
> > lot of interesting things to fiddle with...
> Yes, that looks like exactly what I wanted.  Thanks!

But its documentation is utterly impenetrable, so I ended up doing ...

    eval {
        if(my $pid = fork()) { # parent
            local $SIG{ALRM} = sub {
                kill 9, $pid; # quit RIGHT FUCKING NOW
                die("Child process timed out\n");
            };
            alarm(5);
            waitpid($pid, 0);
            alarm(0);
        } else {
            exec(@blah);
        }
    };

-- 
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Perl: the only language that makes Welsh look acceptable