How can I kill a Perl system call after a timeout?

Question

I\'ve got a Perl script I\'m using for running a file processing tool which is started using backticks. The problem is that occasionally the tool hangs and It needs to be killed

Answer 1

I would probably not use `` for this. Instead I would open() the command with | so that it runs asynchronously. This will return the pid. Then you can do a nonblocking wait() in a loop with sleep that after a certain number of tries without success, issues a signal to the child pid.