Need time-out procedure for HTML perl procedure

[lester kahn]

I have the following perl script which works nicely. It takes a list of URLs from a file, looks up each one, and returns the meta-keywords for that domain. Problem is, sometimes it hangs because it goes to a site which does not respond. I'm wondering if there is a method by which if it times out, or gets an error response, or in the alternative, a success response, it will know to continue on to the next line in the file. Here is the current script which works, but, as I said, hangs upon grabbing meta-keywords from a bad site:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
#print "Content-type: text/html\n\n"; 
use LWP::Simple; 
use HTML::HeadParser; 
open (OUTFILE, '>outfile.txt'); 
open (MYFILE, 'url3.txt'); 
foreach $line (<MYFILE>) { 
chomp($line); 
$URL = get($line); 
$Head = HTML::HeadParser->new; 
$Head->parse("$URL");  
print OUTFILE $Head->header('X-Meta-Description') . "."; 
} 
close(MYFILE); 
close(OUTFILE); 
exit;

[toolic]

I can't see a way to configure the timeout for LWP::Simple, but its POD directs you to LWP::UserAgent, which does seem to allow you to control the timeout.

[RonB]

See: 'perldoc -f alarm

http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/alarm.html