[CLUE-Tech] perl fork

[Jason S. Friedman]

I'm wanting to execute a shell command from within a Perl
program and fail if it does not return with a specified
number of seconds.

It's okay (in fact, preferable) if the system call
continues to run, I just want the Perl wrapper program to
fail so that I can alert an operator that something might
be wrong.

How?

I've got this far:
$command = "/usr/bin/long_running_exec";
system( $command );
$exit_status = $CHILD_ERROR>>8;