Re^2: Executing Systems Calls with Care

in reply to Re: Executing Systems Calls with Care
in thread Executing Systems Calls with Care

UPDATE: I modified this post because I thought noone had answered it and I thought better of my question after testing. In the interest of keeping following posts On Topic, this sub_question was initially,
"Will it work if you substitute &some_subroutine; instead of die?" in the section local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
CURRENT QUESTION:

     local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" };
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I can replace the die "alarm\n" section here with a subroutine with no problems (actually tested it ;->)

but this brings up something else that I don't understand.. What causes the above example to enter the

if ($@) 
    {
    die unless $@ eq "alarm\n";   # propagate unexpected errors
    # handle the timed out operation
    }
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section?

-Kevin

my $a='62696c6c77667269656e6440676d61696c2e636f6d';
while ($a=~m/(^.{2})/s)
{print unpack('A',pack('H*',"$1"));$a=~s/^.{2}//s;}
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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom