Well blow me down, BrowserUK is correct. I've never gotten alarm() to work reliably on Windows - perhaps because I'm not that versed in Signals and didn't know what I was doing or was trying on a system call without the eval/die as described in alarm; however, alarm() added in my original script works:
use strict;
use warnings;
my $pid = open(my $fileHandler, '-|', "./test.exe" );
my $DONE = 0;
$SIG{ALRM} = sub { $DONE = 1 };
alarm 2;
while (<$fileHandler>) {
print "$_\r"; # \r to not overrun output screen buffer
last if ($DONE)
}
print "\nTimeout! - Time to kill pid: $pid\n"
And the output
VinsWorldcom@C:\Users\VinsWorldcom\tmp> TimeThis test.pl
TimeThis : Command Line : test.pl
TimeThis : Start Time : Fri Oct 12 13:01:09 2012
114601
Timeout! - Time to kill pid: 4700
TimeThis : Command Line : test.pl
TimeThis : Start Time : Fri Oct 12 13:01:09 2012
TimeThis : End Time : Fri Oct 12 13:01:12 2012
TimeThis : Elapsed Time : 00:00:02.454