I got so hung up on the for thing I didn't even think of alarm. perfect, thanks.

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
[download]

If your thing cannot be interrupted, then keep track of the Time.

while($runningtime<$maxtime)
{
  dosomething(); 
}
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Another another option may be to use perlembed to embed an interpreter in a pthread, which is sent an internal signal to finish from another thread after 60 seconds of sleep. The murdered thread can have cleanup handlers installed to ensure that the important stuff got done and now you can finish. I would consider this the most professional way. Good luck!

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.

my $start = time;
while(time < $start + 60) {
   # code goes here
}
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Now, if only there were a builtin function that would cause the script to pause for a specified number of seconds ... like, say, this one?

=)

As far as the general question goes, timing with a for loop seems subject to system load as well as the more obvious things (like available RAM, processor type and speed, etc.). Even if you benchmarked it, how could you ever rely on the system being in the same state as it was when you benchmarked it?

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

sleep won't do it. I want it to actually *do* something for that period of time. Actually, i want it to spike CPU for that period of time, so sleep is quite unsuited to that =)

"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play."   --Nietzsche
[download]

alarm(), as suggested earlier, will work just fine. It sounds as though you are building some sort of test suite, though.

In that case, to keep it modular, it may make sense to fork a child and have the parent sleep(60) then kill the child.

Update: This also has the advantage of returning all the memory back to the OS after your malloc() fest. TIMTOWTDI