how to use alarm() to properly time out a connection?

[Ian Zapczynski]

Hello all,

I need to use alarm to time out a connection to an SFTP server if the connection hangs (I was able to reproduce such a hang using the Secure Shell Server for Windows, so I thought it would be nice if my script assumed this was a possibility).

I think I am not understanding the perldoc for alarm properly, because the following test script did not do what I want it to do:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

eval {
while (1) {
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
alarm 60;
}
};

if ($@) {
print "uh, I didn't time out" unless $@ eq "alarm\n"; }

In reality, I don't want such a loop that is always true - this is just my test case. The real code looks more like:

eval {
$sftp = Net::SFTP->new($FTPHOST, user=>$FTPUSER, password=>$FTPPASS);
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
alarm 60;
};

if ($@) {
&sendSNMP unless $@ eq "alarm\n"; }

When I run the test code with the endless while loop, the script never times out. Can someone explain how I miswrote my script?

Unfortunately the hung SFTP connection is hard to reproduce consistently, so I want to be sure my code *should* work if such a situation occurs. Please note that the SFTP connection must exist in an eval() so when it dies, it does not exit my script.
Thanks!



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