Killing frozen system("something.exe") call - how?

[Alexandre Bougakov]

Hello,

I am using ActivePerl under Windows. I wrote a small script that
indexes a lot of *.pdf and *.doc files in a given directory using
external parsers.

It finds a file, and calls

system ("${doc2text_path}doc2text.exe -d cp1251 ${filename} >
${temp}output.txt");

the problem is that doc2text.exe "freezes" on some documents. It
outputs the text, but suddently stops, put Perl keeps waiting for it
to finish. I have to kill the script manually, delete the file that
caused the converter to stop and restart it all again.

The question is: can I make Perl to stop waiting for a called external
program to finish after one minute, for example, and than to kill the
frosen app., say "oops.." and to continue with the next commands?

Thanks in advance,
Sanja