Name
alarm
Synopsis
alarm n
Sends a SIGALRM
signal to the executing Perl program after
n
seconds. On some older systems,
alarms go off “at the top of the second,” so, for instance, an
alarm 1
may go off anywhere
between 0 to 1 seconds from now, depending on when in the current
second it is. An alarm 2
may go
off anywhere from 1 to 2 seconds from now. And so on.
Each call disables the previous timer, and an argument of
0
may be supplied to cancel the
previous timer without starting a new one. The return value is the
number of seconds remaining on the previous timer.
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