Perl fork and kill - kill(0, $pid) always returns 1, and can't kill the child

Question

I am running a perl script on a Linux host. I\'m trying to write a script that forks, where the child starts a program that takes forever and the parent times out after 5 s

Answer 1

Try killing the process group (use -$pid):

kill TERM => -$pid;

See perlipc.