Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to write a signal to exit when a process times out. What I have come up with from poking around the web is this.

#!/usr/bin/perl

eval {
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm clock restart" };
alarm 10;

open(DSMADMC, "dsmadmc -se=tsmpc1 -id=XXXXX -pass=XXXXX -commadelimited
<<EOF
select * from summary where schedule_name=\'WEEKLY_ARCHIVE_11PM\' |") or
die "exec: $!\n";
EOF
;
alarm 0;
};
if ($@ and $@ !~ /alarm clock restart/) { die }

while ($line=<DSMADMC>) {
chomp($line);
print ("$line\n");
} #end while

What I am trying to do is that whenver

open(DSMADMC, "dsmadmc -se=tsmpc1 -id=XXXXX -pass=XXXXX -commadelimited
<<EOF
select * from summary where schedule_name=\'WEEKLY_ARCHIVE_11PM\' |") or
die "exec: $!\n";
EOF
;
times out the exit occurs. So far when I set the alarm to 0 to test nothing happens. Can someone set me straight as to what I need to do?

Signal handling is absolutely fine, I don't find any problem with timeout...

Could you please check whether there is any error after the eval block...

eval {
local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm clock restart" };
alarm 10;

open(DSMADMC, "dsmadmc -se=tsmpc1 -id=XXXXX -pass=XXXXX -commadelimited
<<EOF
select * from summary where schedule_name=\'WEEKLY_ARCHIVE_11PM\' |") or
die "exec: $!\n";
EOF
;
alarm 0;
};

Add a print statement for $@ after the above block... there could be an error and you are doing die simply without printing it...

Also could you please tell me what is happening when you run this program, it died without any error message ?? or is it printing the lines and time out is not happening ??

I think you are missing "|" in the following command

open(DSMADMC, "| dsmadmc -se=tsmpc1 -id=XXXXX -pass=XXXXX -commadelimited

Thanks for the reply.

I added a print statement for $@ and shows blank "".

The program does print the expected output, but what I am trying to test is the alarm. I use open(DSMADMC, "dsmadmc -se=tsmpc1 -id=XXXXX -pass=XXXXX -commadelimited
<<EOF
select * from summary where schedule_name=\'WEEKLY_ARCHIVE_11PM\' |") or
die "exec: $!\n";
EOF
;
in a cgi script and send the output to a web page. Sometimes the web page doesn't load and creates a "nobody" process. I was thinking that if I put an alarm on the process to exit if it doesn't return after a certain number of seconds I could avoid creating the "nobody" processed.