Ways to do timeouts in Perl?

Question

I frequently use the following pattern to set an upper bound to the running time of a particular code fragment in Perl:

my $TIMEOUT_IN_SECONDS = 5;
eval {
           


        

Answer 1

You probably want to look at Sys::SigAction. I haven't used it myself, but it has some glowing reviews.

One thing to watch out for is if "stuff that might timeout" uses sleep or alarm itself. Also, in the error handling code, I assume you're prepared for errors other than a timeout.