Hays

That's not entirely true:

C:\>perl -le "$SIG{ALRM}=sub{print'Hello'};alarm(2);sleep 4;print 'Don
+e.'"
Hello
Done.
C:\>perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.5 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread

Copyright 1987-2004, Larry Wall

Perl may be copied only under the terms of either the Artistic License
+ or the
GNU General Public License, which may be found in the Perl 5 source ki
+t.

Complete documentation for Perl, including FAQ lists, should be found 
+on
this system using `man perl' or `perldoc perl'.  If you have access to
+ the
Internet, point your browser at http://www.perl.com/, the Perl Home Pa
+ge.
[download]

That must be very outdated. alarm interrupted sleep for me in ActivePerl 5.8.0 and 5.8.8 (but not in 5.6.1) on WinXP.

That's a pretty old FAQ, alarm has been in ActiveState Perl since 5.8.

jdtoronto

Update Then I look further down and see ikegami already said that!

From ActivePerl documentation it seems alarm is not yet support Certain functions don't seem to work on ActivePerl. There are several functions that are unimplemented in the ActivePerl system. Here is a complete list of unimplemented functions: Functions for processes and process groups alarm(), getpgrp(), getppid(), getpriority(), setpgrp(), setpriority() can someone please confirm if it is supported