Re: your mail

["Kyle R . Burton" <mortis@voicenet.com>]

>          I have a Perl script accessing headlines from abc. Works great
> but sometimes abc is not responding very nicely. Scripts hangs, not
> all the time, just occasionally on:
> 
> $raw_html_page=get "http://abcnews.go.com/";;
> 
> Is there a way I can tell this thing to only wait for a reasonable amount of
> time then abandon the attempt to contact the site?

Use a sigalarm?  This is coopted from the perlfunc manpage entry for alarm.

eval {
  local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n"; };
  alarm 2;
  $raw_html_page=get "http://abcnews.go.com/";;
  alarm 0;
};
if($@) {
  die unless $@ eq "alarm\n";
}


k

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mortis@voicenet.com                            http://www.voicenet.com/~mortis
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