> > We don't need complete portability ; having this safety > > measure on major > > unixes should be enough. And on Cygwin :) (I don't remember > > tests hanging on Windows or VMS.) > > Alas they do on windows. > > Im thinking that maybe Win32::Process is the solution but I > havent tried anything out yet.
Just a thought but [tye] (McQueen) pointed out an interesting angle to this. In OS/2 and Win32 there is a magic variant of system() that may be useful for this scenario: perl -le "system(1,'perl -le \"print qq[Non blocking]; sleep 10; warn qq[system() call];\"'); sleep(1),print for 1..10" Apparently it was never implemented on *nix, but since *nix probably has a reliable alarm mechanism maybe this would be a viable Win32/OS2 workaround. Damn but its cool though. :-) Yves
