signal.alarm replacement in Windows [Python]

Question

I have a function that occasionally hangs.

Normally I would set an alarm, but I\'m in Windows and it\'s unavailable.

Is there a simple way around this, or sh

Answer 1

I realize this thread has been inactive for some time, but I faced a similar issue and hope that someone else may find this useful as well.

As @jfs mentioned in a useful comment, the standard threading module provides a Timer method that works really well for this (docs). It is just a subclass of threading.Thread, but it makes this very simple and clean. It can also be canceled using the inherited cancel method.

import threading
delay_time = 3   # delay time in seconds
def watchdog():
  print('Watchdog expired. Exiting...')
  os._exit(1)

alarm = threading.Timer(delay_time, watchdog)
alarm.start()
my_potentially_never_ending_call()
alarm.cancel()