Problem

You have a script which runs too long and you want to time it out, after a given number
of seconds.

Solution

Useful bit of code to time-out a section of your Perl script, via the alarm function.

See the example tab.

Example


#!/usr/bin/perl

eval {

   local %SIG;
   $SIG{ALRM}=
     sub{ die "timeout reached, after 20 seconds!n"; };
   alarm 20;
   print "sleeping for 60 secondsn";
   sleep 60; # This is where to put your code, between the alarms
   alarm 0;
};

alarm 0;

if($@) { print "Error: $@n"; }

exit(0);

__END__


View screen shot demo of perl timeout

Reference

[tags]Perl timeout, Perl Coding School[/tags]

• Perl Doc – alarm