[perl-win32-gui-users] no alarm() in Win32, any work-arounds?

[Kurt G]

This is not exactly a Win32::GUI question but a Win32 perl question:
Today I became the 146,037th perl programmer to discover that Win32 totally 
ignores
the alarm() function and SIG{ALRM} signal. Not even Time:HiRes ualarm() 
works. Unbelievable.

So are there any clever work-arounds? I saw one suggestion of using 
Win32::Process
to spawn a whole new process (as a seperate executable) just for the feature 
you want
to implement a timeout and use WAIT setting to kill it (and redirect STDIN 
and STDOUT so you can communicate with the new process)... does anyone know 
a more elegant solution? I looked at the Win32::API methods and didn't see 
anything directly related there.

Thanks,
Kurt